History Memes

You're living in the past, it's a new generation!

Explanation: Oda Nobunaga and Vlad Tepes were rulers of the late medieval/early modern era who earned a reputation for violence so terrible that, to this day, cultural depictions often portray them both as monstrous.

For Vlad Tepes, often referred to as 'Dracula', his reputation was built on severity and ruthlessness. He was said to brook no opposition from his nobility (how terrible!), and that the law was so feared in his lands that even unattended property was as safe as it would be in a locked chest.

Most terrible, however, was that his country of Romania was locked in a war with the much larger and much more powerful Muslim polity of the Ottoman Empire... with little help coming from Romania's Christian coreligionists. So Vlad, to 'even the odds', embarked on campaigns of total terror against Muslim Ottoman troops which shocked even his fellow Christians - he would quite literally impale them on wooden stakes after capturing them, leaving them to die in agony over the course of several days. Thus, Vlad 'Tepes' - Vlad 'The Impaler',

Inside of Romania, he has a conditionally good reputation - he did, after all, drive back the Ottomans and prevent them from conquering Romania, and the common people of Romania at the time preferred one harsh ruler (Vlad Tepes) to many harsh rulers (out-of-control nobility). His patronymic, 'Dracula', was later used for a famous vampire story written in the late 19th century AD.

Oda Nobunaga, on the other hand, was somewhat more of a 'wild card'. Known as the 'Fool of Owari' from a young age, he seemed to take things not nearly as seriously as he should have... considering that he was a warlord in a period of extreme civil strife in Japan. He could, well, play the 'fool' at times - trading mocking barbs with his enemies, changing his mind on a whim, drunkenly throwing his vassal's good porcelain into a pond... and he could be utterly calculating and ruthless other times, choosing when to strike and who to sacrifice for the greatest gain for his armies, burning monasteries, breaking truces and letting noble hostages of his own vassals be executed, and slaughtering his way through enemy lands to deprive them of economic resources.

He was well-known as an eccentric genius with wide-ranging interests, who valued merit over noble descent, notably recruiting a Black man, Yasuke, as a samurai and his retainer, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a peasant who eventually became one of Nobunaga's greatest generals and his immediate successor. He was extremely innovative in his tactics, and in the course of attempting to unite Japan to end the past ~100 years of civil war, also attempted to reform Japanese society to a more 'rational' standard, giving towns and cities a socially accepted position, promoting trade, and building infrastructure.

He has a mixed reputation in the modern day, being respected as a reformer and uniter, but also noted for his brutality. He sometimes shows up in popular depictions (playing loosely with history, of course) as a literal demon - in part because of said brutality, and in part because he once mocked one of his particularly religious enemies by signing his letter as "The Demon King of the Sixth Heaven"

Being so violent and feared that you are the good guy in drifters

do you guys know about st. olga of kiev lol

Konami and Capcom should team up for a Castlevania x Onimusha crossover with Dracula and Nobunaga