20 Historical Bad Guys Who Really Weren’t

They say history is written by the Victors, which is an insane coincidence because all those guys named Victor sure did a lot of winning. Sometimes, it wasn’t even guys, let alone ones with a specific name. Once upon a time, we would have all believed what a corporation wanted us to believe about a person who stood up against them or an artist with a poetic license to kill wanted to portray.

But now, we have the internet. We have Wikipedia and podcasts. And here on the information superhighway, nothing drives faster than pointing out the flaws in the narratives we’ve been fed our whole lives by movies and history class. As a result, when user jamespeech111 asked r/AskReddit, “Who is a bad guy in history who actually wasn’t a bad guy?” everyone had a story they’d learned from someone’s deep dive.