"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain…"

Neoteros

Neoteros

This quote could apply to a lot of people IRL, from politicians (Aung San Suu Kyi, Robert Mugabe...) to athletes and entertainers (Lance Armstrong, Michael Jackson...) and more. There's been quite a few threads about people dying sooner than IRL and being remembered as heroes rather than villains, but what about the other way around? Is there anyone that could've completely lost it a few decades down the line?

Che Guevara and Thomas Sankara come to mind, for example: both icons of the anti-imperialist struggle that nonetheless had an authoritarian streak that could've made them go weird places later in life.
 
Gillan1220

Gillan1220

Interesting quote. I think this should be moved to Current Politics under Chat because it may involve politicians that are considered recent or the mention of them may be controversial.

We have the same situation in the Philippines under Marcos, FVR (who was a Korean War and Vietnam vet), Arroyo (took over after Estrada resigned by turned out be to corrupt like her boss/predecessor), and Rodrigo Duterte.
 
Tabs

Tabs

Richard Nixon. He went from being a pretty popular president with plans to implement healthcare reform, to being remembered as the one president to be forced to resign.
 
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overoceans

@Neoteros

Just to clarify...

What you want are examples of people who IOTL died young and with a good reputation, and then we imagine that they had lived longer and gotten bad reputations?
 

sampleswift

Maybe a reverse case?
A man who died a villain but could have become a hero?
(Like how most Dragon Ball villains other than Frieza, Cell, and Goku Black end up redeemed?)
 

Sam R.

The problem is that you need to have a deep biographical analysis of an existing hero:
Che’s semi-imperial racist chauvanism towards africans
Che’s continual reliance on organisers in other domains of struggle
Che’s willingness to chase seen as impossible projects

to discover their tragic hubris and their corrupted form.

To my mind dying abandoned in a useless formalistic struggle is Che’s hubris perfected anyway.

IMO it isn’t just “nice person is evil,” but rather abused child star is unable and unwilling to transcend his trauma and inflicts it onwards. The latent evil you're proposing needs to lay inside that hero waiting to emerge. MacBeth and Duncan both hear similar prophesies. Duncan's response is "Oh wow, that'll happen by itself, cool." Macbeth's response is, "I will make that happen, and I choose blood."
 

New Cleo Genesis

Manfred von Richthofen? Had he not died in 1918 he could easily have become the head of an extremist movement that would later lead Germany into a disastrous war.
 

overoceans

I wonder what FDR's reputation would be had he lived long enough to use the atom bombs, and also lay the groundwork for the Cold War eg. complicity in the Jeju Massacre in Korea. Bonus points if he wins in '48 and goes in for a pound on Korea.

(In my experience, most liberals regard Truman as more or less beyond reproach, but a lot of people to the left of that think he's a bit of a bastard.)
 

Disraeli's Ghost

Neoteros said:
There's been quite a few threads about people dying sooner than IRL and being remembered as heroes rather than villains, but what about the other way around? Is there anyone that could've completely lost it a few decades down the line?
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Princess Diana. She'd have lost her beauty by now and be showing the signs of substance abuse.
 

marktaha

Banned
overoceans said:
I wonder what FDR's reputation would be had he lived long enough to use the atom bombs, and also lay the groundwork for the Cold War eg. complicity in the Jeju Massacre in Korea. Bonus points if he wins in '48 and goes in for a pound on Korea.

(In my experience, most liberals regard Truman as more or less beyond reproach, but a lot of people to the left of that think he's a bit of a bastard.)
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I'm a conservative who ranks him among my favourite Presidents. The Chicago song from 1975 is more relevant than ever today!
 

Helicon One

I can easily picture an ageing Bill Hicks during the 21st century taking his early 90s fascination with conspiracy topics like the JFK assassination and heading fully off into the deep end of 9/11 truthery and COVID denialism, getting less and less funny and more and more deranged each time he speaks.
 
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Kammada

CASSICTOR2 said:
Vladimir Lenin is a pretty good example of a Person who loses themselves for Achieve their goals
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If Lenin died before 1917, he'd rather would have been remembered as a fairly minor figure only known to historians of Marxism. Up to his triumphant return to Russia in spring of that year, he was thriving on the margins of the Russian socialist movement and thought.

On the other hand, compared and contrasted to Stalin he had a pretty good standing among the solid chunk of the Soviet intelligentsia otherwise critical of the late Soviet system, so you might say that he's got that kind of 'died early enough to remain a hero' reputation OTL.

Back on topic, I may imagine Stalin himself remaining a hero - a romantic noble brigand turned people's general - if he is killed while defending Tsaritsyn (future Stalingrad, for those not familiar enough) in 1918. In an ATL where the Soviet system is as oppressive as OTL, there would be people grumbling that things wouldn't have been that bad if Stalin was alive.

A somewhat downplayed, making just a few months' difference (and quite morbid, given the circumstances of these months) example is George Orwell. His reputation among today's left won't be tarnished if he died shortly after sending Nineteen Eighty-Four - that is, before making his infamous list of the Soviet sympathizers and agents of influence.
 

Fire and shadow

Helicon One said:
I can easily picture an ageing Bill Hicks during the 21st century taking his early 90s fascination with conspiracy topics like the JFK assassination and heading fully off into the deep end of 9/11 truthery and COVID denialism, getting less and less funny and more and more deranged each time he speaks.
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Wasn't it a conspiracy theory he actually did that by re-branding himself as Alex Jones?
 

Sam R.

Lion and Unicorn does more to break Orwell’s trivial romance. The deeper issue is that Orwell did the best he could coming from the social sewer of back street private schools and genocidal imperialism. This is less a hero/villain or tragic hero role than a “post Western” hero. Think Bill Money from Unforgiven. The utter impotence of his final threat to come back and shoot everyone if he hears about anything bad happening. He starts as a failed farmer, kills his friend, and ends up as a dry goods clerk. Orwell is a post-Revolutionary kleine bourgeois hero.

Born to fail but accidentally lived trying not to (but still did).
 
Fries

Fries

CASSICTOR2 said:
Vladimir Lenin is a pretty good example of a Person who loses themselves for Achieve their goals
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As a Leninist I couldn't agree more. In his writings he stresses the necessity for workplace democracy and was good friends with people across the Left-Right Commie spectrum (Trotsky, Stalin, Kalinin, and Bukharin); by 1924 factions had been banned, War Communism was a failure, and he set up the rise of demagogues like Stalin which, in turn, led to the rise of the culture of corruption that surrounded Khrushchev and especially Brezhnev.

To get back on topic: Sun Yat-Sen. He started as an idealistic semi-socialist revolutionary but the system he set up doomed itself with Yuan Shikai and later Chiang Kai-Chek; ineffectual warlords, the White Terror, and then the rise of Mao (although that can be attributed more to Stalin than Sun, but I digress).
 
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