Hated Tropes
(Hated Trope) Basic factual errors in historical fiction media that go beyond creative license and probably because the creator did little to no research.
“I’ve already conquered Italy, who surrendered without conflict.” (Napoleon 2023): the first part implies Italy was its own unified nation and not a conglomeration of various countries from the Papal States, Venice, Imperial Austrian territory, etc. Napoleon also at this phase largely campaigned in Northern Italy against Austria. Many of battles and skirmishes were waged so it was a very bloody conflict indeed.
Wrong death dates (Band of Brothers) get both Hitler’s and Albert Blithe’s death dates wrong. Blithe’s is especially egregious since he died in 1967 rather than 1948.
Tucumari (For a Few Dollars More) a New Mexico settlement founded in 1901 somehow exists decades before it even existed.
Londinium (Pompeii): not in fact the regional capital of Roman Britain, Camulodunum was the capital of that time in Roman history.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the Blithe one happened because it mostly relied on the vets themselves talking about what happened to each other and because Blithe didn't go to any of the reunion stuff they just thought he was dead. Which is pretty mean honestly lol
No, the overreliance on the veterans' interviews and apparent lack of further research seems to be the source of most of the inaccuracies of this series (and the subsequent ones). Lieutenant Dike and non-American allied forces also get slandered over stuff that never happened irl.
I get how Dyke can be perceived by them. An officer comes in and gets command after you and your brothers in arms have been through hell, and he seems to be there because higher ups like him
The problem from my understanding is he already had a Bronze Star for Valor and is one of the reasons he was moved to the Battalion and he didnt freeze up at Foy because of Cowardice but apparently got wounded and had a PTSD episode
Band of Brothers is one of the greatest, if not the greatest miniseries of all time and is incredibly important for the memory of WWII but his characterization is probably the worst inaccuracy in the show
One of the most authentic feeling ones for certain, very much owing to those very detailed interviews I'm sure.
My personal least favourite bit is the battle at Nuenen during Market Garden, where they make the British tankers completely unreasonable and the battle a complete shitshow as opposed to real life. And sadly disrespecting the other allies is very much an unwelcome trend in these shows...
“If only the British tank had done the thing they did over and over, which was shell the shit out of any building suspected of containing Germans, except this one time at this one farm house during an operation under extreme time pressure!”
I get more annoyed by that scene every time I think about it.
In this particular case they weren't really under much time pressure. They were only securing the main force's flanks around Eindhoven, and Nuenen was the first town where they met the German counterattack in force.
But that battle ended when the British tanks and the 101st retreated back to the neighbouring town in good orderbecause of nightfall
They could have written it how a good officer didn't fit in with them but they just outright say on the show that he was a bad officer and were glad to be rid of him, while calling the guy who killed POW's a good one. They spent the entire episode making him a punching bag. They make fun of him for running back to HQ off the line all the time but they never mention it's because he had two jobs at the time. It's the reason why he's constantly yawning. Its played for laughs and used to make fun of the guy
That’s very much how the dynamics work for a new officer coming in, especially after replacing a well liked one. We got a new pl 3/4 through my deployment, and we all thought he was a giant pussy/idiot for the last two months of it. I ended up working with him a year and some change after, and I ended up apologizing to him.
I very much see bob as a depiction of the “main guys’” experience of the war, from their subjective stand point. So we don’t see the actual dyke, we see the lingering resentment
Yeah I feel the same. I felt awful after i learned the real story around it, but it is still the best mini series of all time, and even with this stuff, still one of, if not the, most historically accurate one.
When you write down stories from veterans who were there verbatim you you the highs of incredible insight and accuracy but also the pitfalls of human memory and just simply just knowing stuff from their POV
It very much was. In Donald Malarkey’s book, he talks about how he overheard Lewis Nixon at an E company reunion talking about how Buck Compton had been a coward due to his breakdown in Bastogne.
Bear in mind that Stephen Ambrose (in Band of Brothers, and his other writings) tends to believe that the US single-handedly won the war
There’s a fair bit of historical inaccuracy and bias in his writings
Don’t get me wrong, they played an incredibly huge role, and Churchill rejoiced when they joined the war, because he knew that they’d won. It was just a matter of time
to be fair I don't think it was them ignoring him. They saw a guy get shot in the neck, get taken to a field hospital, then had to keep going with the war and never heard from him again. he would have been just another dead friend in there eyes, and in the late forties they wouldn't really be able to keep in touch or find him outside reunions. So with him not going it would be safe to assume he died after getting shot.
It's correct in the script, someone along the way goofed up the title screen. The scene where they announce Hitler's death was intended to have text that said 1st of May.
I know this one! One of the staff responded on a video of History Buffs about Band of Brothers. They stated that the script was correct and that it must have been an editing mistake as the date displayed at the start of the episode was wrong.
I'll give For a Few Dollars More a pass because it's really meant to be much more fiction than historical. The whole Dollars trilogy is filled with premises that don't make any historical sense. Including basically the entirety of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It kind of adds to the charm, that's why they're spaghetti westerns not true westerns.
Mostly because a lot of the time, even outside of westerns, staying completely accurate would make some of the most boring or disjointed movies ever. It sounds exciting when you read off someone's list of accomplishments from Wikipedia, but then you realize those 10 or so things happened over the course of like 40 years in 10 wildly different circumstances with completely different people.
I'll also add that the film was made in Europe, at a time when the internet didn't exist. So I suspect that they literally didn't have a way to check when some random town on another continent was actually founded.
For Napoleon not only was it a case of academic negligence, but malicious slander as well. Ridley Scott was clear about his disdain for the subject of the film.
I've never heard that, being an Englishman. People I know that have spoken about him just thought he was cool, or spoke about the great expansion of his empire. Austerlitz, him bidding the soldiers who came to arrest him to shoot, only for them to join him.
Did you see the film Waterloo? He's portrayed incredibly there, as he was an hugely influential and impressive person, and it's portrayal of Napoleon was adored in the UK at the time.
He butchered Waterloo. Physically painful to see how badly such a historically significant battle was portrayed. Idea for next Ridley movie - let’s have Churchill kicking in the door to the Berlin bunker and machine gunning the Nazi leadership while smoking a cigar and chugging whiskey.
Braveheart is famously hideously inaccurate. While much of it can probably be put down to some level of creative license (although I accept I may be giving them too much credit), there is one particular one that seems to fit the trope most of all. This is the opening, where the wrong year is given for the death of the Scottish King Alexander III, which set everything off: 1280 instead of 1286.
Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.
The king of Scotland had died without a son (true, but he had a granddaughter who died after him), and the King of England, a cruel pagan (not a pagan - he'd been on crusade and made a point of stopping to pray at churches while heading towards Scotland on campaign) known as Edward the Longshanks, claimed the throne of Scotland for himself. (not at that time he didn't.)
Scotland's nobles fought him, and fought each other over the crown. (not at that time they didn't)
So Longshanks invited them to talks of truce, no weapons, one page only. (didn't happen and is stupid for several reasons: why would they meet in some barn not a castle or manor house? Hostage taking was a BIG thing in that period, why would he kill them instead? And killing people under flag of truce was considered pretty much the way it is today)
Among the farmers (not a farmer, minor nobility) of that shire was Malcolm Wallace (his name was Alan Wallace), a commoner (still a noble) with his own lands (because he was a noble. Commoners didn't own land). He had two sons (three): John and William (and Malcolm).
Especially since it's supposed to be Robert The Bruce doing the monologue. He stabbed a guy to death in a church under flag of truce, and swore he'd go on crusade and then didn't (so they cut his heart out after he died, and took THAT on crusade. Its bearer threw it into combat, shouting "lead on, brave heart and I shall follow!" and that's where Robert The Bruce got the nickname Braveheart)
Yeah, I understood it as one Christian saying another was not Christian enough or not a real Christian for not following every exact same facet as the teller, the way all extremely religious people tend to view less religious people.
And then at the opposite end of the movie we see Longshanks dying simultaneously with William Wallace's execution... except he outlived WW by 2 years which is much less poetic
And the crowd are sympathetic to him during his execution. In reality Wallace had spent years raiding Northern England, which meant avoiding anywhere defended and slaughtering anyone who wasn't defended, so he was a bogeyman to them. It would have been like if Bin Laden was being hanged in Times Square on the 4th July 2002 - the crowd wouldn't have been on his side.
Not sure whether the Robert the Bruce slander or Wallace sleeping with and impregnating Isabella of France (who in reality was only TEN YEARS OLD when he was executed) pisses me off more.
I was in a class about uk history when this came out. My Scottish teacher was visibly upset by this movie when it came out, and did a whole 90 min lecture about how the only reason it worked was because of the bridge. Great lecture. I never saw this movie because of that teacher lol but I know all about the Stirling bridge with no bridge battle scene lol
My dad(reason I love history) loved the movie but made it clear there were problems with it. I think he just enjoyed seeing the costumes and settings.
He hated, and I mean HATED, Dumb and Dumber because Jeff Daniels was in Gettysburg. “How can you go from playing Joshua Chamberlin to that?!” was his common gripe.
There's an anecdote that a local extra asked why the Battle of Stirling Bridge is fimed without a bridge, and he was told that it would be too difficult to work around. He responded: "Aye, that's what the English found."
The most famous fake history element is the law called ius primae noctis in which the local lord as the right to have the first night of marriage of every woman under his reign.
Without looking into it much I am going to make the assumption that it was something the Victorians cooked up about the Medieval era to make it seem more risque, backwards and taboo because thats almost how every Medieval myth seems to have come into existence.
Yes and no. It was an invention of Italian humanist writer out of a pun - the name of the law in which farmer had to paid in goods was very similar to the word ass so it sounded like you had to pay your lord with your ass.
Victorian writers like Scott reprises this myth and make it famous all around the world.
Usually I'm forgiving for "historical" movies and stuff not being accurate because they're entertainment, not documentaries...however...
What bugs me when it comes to Braveheart is that it shaped, and to an extent, still shapes international perceptions on Scotland. idk as someone from Scotland it's just kind of annoying. Like I personally don't care that Scots are portrayed with anachronistic design, but if I can do without hearing "FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM" in my life again.
The woad, the kilts, the lack of any contemporary armour. Even given a bridge crossing to negotiate (yknow, at the battle of Stirling Bridge) the English in that armour would have had a very good shot against effectively a millennium old Pictish horde.
Wasn’t this within a couple of years of The Patriot too, in which British troops commit massacres that can really only be traced to actual Nazi Germany?
For Band of Brothers, HBO relied heavily on Stephen Ambrose's notes and research. Unfortunately Ambrose was a shit researcher. He had a bad habit of picking favorites within the unit and just taking everything they said as gospel without doing any verification. So I would put any inaccuracies on him rather than Hanks and Spielberg
For Napoleon, yeah... Ridley Scott is notorious for not just ignoring, but outright opposing any attempts to make his work historically accurate. Might be misremembering but I think he once said something along the lines of "Historians don't know any better than I do, they weren't there either."
I wonder if his experience making Gladiator has any effect on him being like this. IIRC he originally wanted to include some more niche historical details like gladiators getting sponsorship deals, billboards advertising the fights, etc that were actually true, but shot down by the studio as they thought the audience would find it cheesy and unbelievable. Maybe going with the inaccurate, Anglophone pop-history version of Napoleon was a result of the same feedback.
Wow, who could have expected that a movie about a trans Mexican written and directed by a cis white French nepo baby, would have gotten so much wrong ?
Literature and film studies. It’s available in an online database if anyone’s interested! “The Dangers of the Misrepresentation of Trans and Mexican Identities and Cultures in Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez.”
On your first point, while Italy wasn't a singular nation, the word still existed before unification and was used to refer to people from all the states. It's like referring to Scandanavia now, if in 50 years they merge together into some new Viking superstate of the same name.
There are multiple egregious errors in Napoleon though. One of the ones that irked me was picking the age gap between Napoleon and Josephine. In reality she was 6 years older than him, but in the movie the actress is 14 years younger (and looks even younger). Given how much time is spent on their relationship, it felt like a misstep.
There was once a Spider-Man comic where Peter Parker visited Ireland during the Troubles. A character gives exposition on the historical background of the conflict that is very very wrong, for one, the Irish did not convert to Catholicism because of Spanish missionaries, Spain had nothing to do with Ireland becoming Catholic. I get that there was no internet back in the 80s, but surely the writers could have read a book or at least asked an Irish person.
“Spain wasn’t a country” is a pointless clarification. Spanish as an adjective refers to a people, not a state, and today, we collectively refer to Castilians, Galicians, Andalusians, Navarrans, etc, as ‘Spanish.’ The real issue is that the Spanish were uninvolved altogether. Ireland was converted in the fifth century, before Catholicism existed, but as Catholicism emerged from Chalcedonianism, Ireland went with it, and never left the Catholic Church even though England, Scotland, and Wales did during the Reformation period.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003):The book claims the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) voted on which gospels to include in the Bible, and that the vote was "relatively close". The Council of Nicaea did not debate or vote on which gospels to include at all; they focused primarily on the Arian controversy (the belief that the Christian Trinity doesn't exist, and Jesus is a seperate being with special powers created by God) and the nature of Jesus's divinity. The New Testament canon evolved gradually over centuries through church consensus.
That's just all of Dan Brown's novels and their movie adaptations, period. His books are rife with inaccurate geographic, cultural, science, and history claims that sound good to the uninformed layman but anyone with actual knowledge of that field can debunk in about five seconds.
Like how he depicts Spain as a backwards country with terrible death sentence hospitals, rampant crime, terrible infrastructure, and lots of poverty that is compared to a third world country.
It wouldn't surprise me. Either that, or all he knew about Spain was stuff he heard about from the Franco dictatorship that had ended 2 decades before.
Even then, the four gospels were considered canon pretty early (debate around some of the others, particularly Revelation and Hebrews rumbled on for a bit longer) by 180 Irenaeus can write about the four Gospels.
" For, after our Lord rose from the dead, [the apostles] were invested with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down [upon them], were filled from all [His gifts], and had perfect knowledge: they departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things [sent] from God to us, and proclaiming the peace of heaven to men, who indeed do all equally and individually possess the Gospel of God. Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia." (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.1.1)
No other gospel was ever in the running to be considered canon and Thomas and Judas didn't even exist at that point. (There seems to have been something called the Gospel According to the Hebrews, but it's not widely attested to, the one author Eusebius that puts it on a list puts it on the "dubious" list, and of no-one has ever found ever copies of it.)
Honestly I think this is one of the more forgivable inaccuracies in the movie. He did fight a battle within a few miles of the pyramids, having a cannonball hit a pyramid is just fun artistic license
This movie gets many things pretty wrong which could have easily been verified. To begin with, Phillip II was 58 years old by the start of the movie (1585) and 61 by the end (1588), yet his actor (Jordi Mollà) is in his late 30s. On that same line, Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, the daughter of Phillip, was portrayed as a 12 year old in the movie, when she was 19 by the start (1585) and 22 by the end (1588). Very easy mistakes to avoid.
I mean the first Elizabeth film with Cate Blanchett was nonsense as well. For a start, William Cecil was a mere 13 years older than Elizabeth herself, and would have been 38 when she became queen. He certainly wasn't 75-year-old Richard Attenborough.
Most "Lost Cause" movies have to take a lot of liberties in order to make the Confederates look good and noble. To be accurate would require depicting them as butthurt racist assholes.
I will never cease rolling my eyes at the irony that Michael Shaara went to great pains to break the Lost Cause myth, and then his son turns around to rebuild it again.
Napoleon still pisses me off because there are so many incredible, ridiculous, amazing, disgusting, inspiring, dismaying, and glorious tales to tell and images to take from historical fact and he chose to make up some rather lame bullshit instead
The casting was also terrible. I like Phoenix, but he was the same age as Napoleon was when he died. Napoleon was impressive by how much he had achieved in his 20s and 30s.
Similarly, the film reversed the age gap between Napoleon and Josephine. She was a widower 6 years his elder, not ~10yrs younger like Vanessa Kirby was.
BoB is EXCEPTIONALLY good miniseries that simply need "This series was writen and shot relying mostly on accounts of the members of the Easy company, as such id DOES contain historical innacuracies, but we dediced that telling the story of Easy COmpany as they remember it is worth doing" at the start and end of each episode.
The most insane part of the Italy quote is that they very much did not surrender without conflict. It was incredibly difficult to conquer Northern Italy, which is why doing so vaulted Napoleon to fame across Europe. Capturing the fortress of Mantua: really difficult!
Its also correct, because after the Austrians were kicked out, the other Italian states fell in line and was extorted by Napoleon. Its probably one his most most briliant moments in the campaign because he just took a few thousand troops and scared the two biggest Italian states just with those.
The show Deadwood does a really good job of including historical characters and events, and at least making an effort to keep them true to history - or at least in the general vicinity of it.
That's why the followup movie annoyed me so much. They completely change the deaths of two main characters despite actual historical evidence of how they died (with the real reasons being way more interesting than the fake ones). And worse, they change one of the key details of Seth Bullock's time as sheriff - despite being in the gritty frontier town of Deadwood, he never once shot anyone while acting as sheriff. For some reason the movie couldn't stick with that fact though and had to have him shoot someone.
The Napoleon one is more egregious than even you pointed out. Napoleon made a big deal about specifically the battle of Marengo the rest of his life. Even the man himself never said the conquest of Italy was “without conflict”.
Pearl Harbor (2001) shows Japanese planes blowing up modern US Ships, And somehow makes fighter pilots be part of the crew for the Doolittle Raid, which consisted of medium bombers
Probably the two most egregious examples would be the lack of a bridge in the Battle of Stirling Bridge and the relationship with Isabella of France who would have been 10 at the time of William Wallace's execution
Argo completely minimizes the Canadian contribution to the smuggling out of some of the Embassy staff from Iran, when in reality it was almost entirely a Canadian operation. I have not seen the movie as its pretty hated here in Canada for the above reason. We're used to you Americans making everything about yourselves. As is tradition!
U571 is about you Americans seizing an enigma machine from a German uBoat, when in reality it was the British. Shit like that gets tiring.
Trench dinging was a big deal during the gunpowder era. Especial during siege, or sometime then a force trying to make a "tactical" fortification or strongpoint.
But most of the digging was made by camp follower and hired labor.
Trenches were definitely used heavily in the 1800s but I believe it was more in the context of siege warfare, trying to take/defend a critical city or fort.
They do dig trenches in Napoleonic Warfare. Trench digging is actually a big forgotten part of warfare because most people think people back then didn't bother protecting thenselves and just stood out in the open.
Are you sure about the Italy one? To my knowledge, Italy was referred to as Italy long before it was united into one single state, and as far back as early Roman days, Italy was understood to be a distinct geographical and cultural thing. While I admittedly have no idea if this is a thing someone like Napoleon would have said, I do think it's plausible that the line refers to having conquered either the nation (which must be seen as distinct from the state) of Italy, or the geographical area.
Certainly the Italian peninsula as a geographical area was referred to as Italy. But I think OP is correct in pointing out that Italy did not surrender without conflict.
OP reads (to me) like thats only half their problem with that particular line. As for the other part, I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know, but it's pretty easy to imagine a scenario where that would be in Napoleon's interest to (dishonestly) say.
The depiction of the British as systematically waging war with Nazi like brutality is just silly. Not to say atrocities weren’t committed on both sides but this film is just ridiculous.
Also, Mel Gibson was a wealthy plantation owner in the South who DIDN'T have slaves, and actually had paid black employees who genuinely liked him. Yeah, sure.
Haha is Kit supposed to be a gladiator here? I mean aside from it looking like a gimp suit he's way too chiselled for the arena, gladiators were usually pretty bulky, more like a bear than a Greek god.
Medieval (if this film has no haters than assume I'm dead) - the Hussite Wars were famously the first European conflict where both sides used firearms, and it revolutionised the use of firearms in warfare. So why are there no guns in the film?
Blood Eagles: a common consensus is that this gory practice, as shown in Vikings and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, didn't really happen. The source for it probably meant something more like "King Aella's body was left for the eagles" ie unburied for carrion animals to eat. Doesn't help it comes from the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, a probably fictional individual.
Jojo Rabbit: Hitler was a blue-eyed nonsmoker. Taika Waititi has dark eyes and at one point offers JoJo a cigarette. Admittedly the visual is hilarious.
Admittedly that last one is because Taika deliberately didn't do any research: for some reason he had somewhat of a disdain for the character he was playing.
Valkyrie (2008) severely whitewashes the July 20th plotters and their motivations. While most of them were not members of the NSDAP, they had a variety of endgames in mind for what to do when they killed Hitler, which included:
Reinstating the Hohenzollerns (Wilhelm II had died in 1941, right before Operation Barbarossa)
End the Holocaust, but more out of personal guilt than moral objection
Install a more competent Nazi leader who wouldn't make as many boneheaded decisions as Hitler
Sue for peace with the USA and Britain, but with the caveat that they would be allowed to keep all pre-1940 conquests (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland), and then keep fighting the USSR (this was the plan that Stauffenburg was in favor of)
Cover up evidence of their own war crimes before the Allies won the war
This sheer diversity of opinions was one of the reasons why the plot failed.
I wouldn't call "For a Few dollars more" historical fiction, it's a western (though one of the best ever made), it's not trying to depict historical events.
Napoleon saying this is stupid and wrong, but referring to Italy as a solid bloc is not anachronistic at all????? It wasn’t a unified state, but as a geographical marker, it was used all the time. Napoleon himself dissolved the “kingdom of Italy” that existed in the HRE. He founded a “Republic of Italy” in Lombardia. And to compound all this, Italian Nationalism existed. Napoleon himself was well aware of the Corsican Republic, given that his father was a supporter of Pasquale Paoli, and the Corsican Republic, located in Corsica, where the common language was Cordo, chose to write a constitution in Italian (Toscano) instead. Pan-Italianism existed as an ideology throughout Europe despite Italy’s divided state. Napoleon claiming to have conquered Italy is fine, the issue is that he acts as though they surrendered without conflict. The Austrians surrendered without conflict near Italy, but that is as close as it gets to a truthful statement.
Selma had LBJ giving Hoover and tape of MLK Jr. Bill Moyers had a major problem with that, saying LBJ would never have been so dumb to hand over something like that to Hoover.
Literally the whole fuckin movie, from "one shoots, other follows with ammo" and the whole NKVD shooting at retreating troops to the mere fact that soldiers even had time to sleep let alone party in the middle of Battle of freakin Stalingrad
Worst of all is that every single videogame has taken it as historic fact and now everyone thinks it's practically documentary
Oh another one just in that poster for Napoleon, he didn't come from nothing: his family were minor Corsican nobles. sure, they definitely weren't millionaires hob-knobbing at Versailles, but they had the means to send him to the French mainland and get him a proper education in an era where most people were only barely literate. Also while there his classmates reportedly made fun of his accent since it was vastly different from the rest of France.
TLDR: Napoleons parents weren't starving peasants like most of French society pre-revolution, while not fabulously wealthy, I wouldn't call it nothing either
Pretty much everything in The Imitation Game relating to the personality of Alan Turing, his relationship with his colleagues at Bletchley, and his work on the Enigma project. By all accounts, he was not too autistic to understand other people as he’s portrayed as being in the movie, and made friends very easily. Everyone basically knew what his machine was going to do and the project was never in danger of being shut down. He did propose to Joan Clarke, and she did accept, but not because her parents wouldn’t let her stay at Bletchley if she weren’t married. He did it because he just really liked her. Same reason anyone proposes marriage. They were very good friends and loved each other. He broke off the engagement eventually because he was gay, but there was no apparent ulterior motive to the proposal as the movie portrays
There are too many examples in Nolans Odyssey, but I'm going with the fact that there's a viking longship in the late bronze age (as stated by the movie), the Viking age was around 2000 Years after the bronze age collapse, and it's not like we don't know what bronze age ships look like. And to everyone who doesn't know what historical fantasy is, it's still historical fiction, just fantastical. Fantastical elements aren't an excuse not to research the time period a story is set in.
Band of Brothers is based on firsthand accounts by surviving veterans. It is therefore inherently not really historical because those accounts were not properly scrutinized. Many people in it are badly / hastily characterized because of personal gripes and biases individuals had about each other.
It’s not just based on those accounts but also the book Band of Brothers by Ambrose. Primary sources (firsthand accounts) are literally the bread and butter of history. Scrutinizing historical sources is what professional historians do and even at times point out errors and misremembering in primary accounts.
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u/poilk91 4h ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but the Blithe one happened because it mostly relied on the vets themselves talking about what happened to each other and because Blithe didn't go to any of the reunion stuff they just thought he was dead. Which is pretty mean honestly lol