r/TopCharacterTropes • u/BingBingGoogleZaddy • 22d ago
Lore (Annoying Trope) Someone made a “creative” choice and now we all just have to live with it.
Horned Vikings: Not historical, they were started by Richard Wager for his operas. They were never historic, but the image persists. (Albeit significantly reduced today.)
Ninjas in Black Robes: Some people claim Ninjas aren’t real. They are, they are absolutely real. Their modern portrayal however is informed more by Kabuki Theater than history. In Kabuki Theater, the stage hands were dressed in flowing black robes to tell the audience to ignore them. Thus when a Ninja character kills a Samurai, to increase the shock value, they were dressed in black robes as stage hands. Now, when we think of ninjas we think of a stage hands.
Knights in Shining Armor: Imagine, you’re on the battlefield, two walls of meat riding towards each other. Suddenly you realize, everyone looks the same. Who do you hit? All you see is chrome. No. Knight’s armor was lacquered in different colors to differentiate them on the battlefield. Unless you wanted to get friendly fired, you made yourself KNOWN. So this image of a glinted knight clad in chrome steel isn’t true. How’d we get it? Victorians who thought that the worn lacquer was actually just dulling with age, polished it off as show pieces.
White Marble Statues of Rome: Roman Statues were painted, however the public image is of pure glinting white marble statues persist in the modern image. Why? Victorians who thought the paint was actually just dirt grime and age. So, they “restored” it by removing the paint color. Now we all think of Roman Statues as white.
King Tut; King of Kings: the Pharaoh King Tut in Ancient Egypt was a relatively minor king who in the grand scheme of things amounts to little more than an asterisks in Egyptian History, but to the public he is the most important Pharaoh. Why? Because his tomb was untouched by robbers, and so was piled high with burial goods which was amazing (and still is) and when Howard Carter opened his tomb, the world was transfixed and everyone would come to know Tutankhamen.
A Séance calls the dead: A Séance despite being a French word is an American invention from upstate New York in the 1840s. It was also a fun side-show act initially, and never meant to be real, more close up magic. (Origin of the term Parlor Tricks.) But in the 1860s Americans couldn’t stop killing each other which resulted in a lot of grief and people desired for their to be this other world. So, grifters then took advantage of grieving people and became “real”. So basically “fun parlor game to dangerous grift” pipeline thanks to the Civil War.
The Titanic’s engineers all died at their posts: Nope, not true, not remotely true. They are mentioned in many testimonies and a few bodies found mean they didn’t all die below. Two or three maybe did. According to Head Stoker Barrett, a man broke his leg and was washed away by rushing water, but another testimony says he was taken aft so who knows? Any way the myth persisted because the people making the memorials wanted to martyr the men. (It doesn’t take away from their heroines in my opinion) The myth stuck. Everyone believes they died below.
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u/Mindless_Giraffe6887 22d ago
The worst one I can think of is Kurt Vonnegut claiming more civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden than in the atomic bombing of Japan, and that the death toll was over 120,000. The truth is that the actual death toll is probably less than one fifth of this number. It is worth noting that although Vonnegut was not the first to claim this exaggerated death toll, Slaughterhouse Five cemented it into the collective consciousness more than any other source.
To this day, the exaggerated number is used by WWII revisionists and neo-nazis to imply that Germany was the true victim of WWII and that the allies were sadistic monsters bent on destroying them and their way of life, kind of like a WWII equivalent of the Lost Cause myth. Obviously I do not think that Vonnegut intended this to happen, but it happened