I know real life can be depressing: your job sucks, you can't get a date, and they keep trying to reboot the DC Comics movie #universe. But life has always sucked, and there have still been heroes who have risen from the crowd of NPCs to give Satan a swirly in based defiance of despair. These are history's greatest whitepills: indelible proof that, while good is always on the backfoot, it has triumphed over evil in the past, and will again before the end.
Pope Leo the Great
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| Uhhh based? |
5th Century Pope Leo I became the only memorable Pope by telling Attila the Hun to fuck off to his face, which the steppe warlord actually did. You might think Leo had reason to feel safe as his esteemed office conferred diplomatic immunity, but you'd be characteristically wrong because the average lifespan of premodern Popes was about 15 seconds, everyone murdered them left and right for any reason or no reason at all, and Attila was such a beast that his name is still synonymous with rampant slaughter to this day, despite the fact that you have no idea who the Huns were, or what else was going on in the 5th Century, or where the little man in the canoe is hiding. The equivalent today would be if the current Pope Leo barged into Blumpf's bedroom, kicked Netanyahu fatally in the cloaca, forced a complete and unconditional IDF surrender, and let's say Ian Miles Cheong died too, somehow.
Gabriele Tadino
Seasoned military engineer Tadino da Martinengo defied his Venetian masters and ditched his governership of the isle of Candia to join the Knights Hospitaller on Rhodes in their defence of the island against the vast forces of Suleiman the Lawgiver. Using a percussive device fitted with bells to alert him to tremors caused by Ottoman mining operations, Tadino was able to sabotage many of their efforts with his own brilliant countermining operation, like if you played Worms Armageddon with the drill- and blowtorch-heavy weapons set, but instead of a fat manchild you were the biggest Chad of renaissance Italy.
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| Chadino reps his Hospitaller drip (1538, colourised). |
When a Turkish mining effort did succeed, its impact was still largely mitigated by Tadino's venting system, which allowed the walls of the Knights' fortress to release much of the shock of the explosion and remain standing with the based impudence of an internet anon who still says gay and retarded. Tadino even lost an eye to enemy arquebus fire and simply replied with the full lyrics of "So What" by the Anti Nowhere League, because his whole life long he never even learned how to give a fuck. A siege that should have been a cakewalk for the Ottomans ended with them beaten down to letting the whole Order leave with all their stuff, whereupon they simply set up their entire operation again on Malta, which held against Suleiman's increasingly buttmad efforts well into the sultan's overly beturbaned seventies.
John Rabe
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| Sometimes piano teacher physiognomy belies a heart of gold and steel. |
German businessman John Rabe took it upon himself to establish the Nanking Safe Zone in the midst of the Sino-Japanese war's most notorious episode, for which he has been credited with saving over 200,000 people, just because it was the right thing to do. Rabe was a humble Christian man who enjoyed gardening and classical music, and received nothing but trouble for his efforts: after w*rld w*r 2 ended, he lived in obscurity and often relied upon donations from grateful Chinese. The allies also made him undergo Denatzification brainwashing because, of course, he was a card-carrying NSDAP member, and an immeasurably better man than you or anyone you know will ever be, because, of course, your entire Manichaean Marvel movie worldview is complete bullshit.
Leonhard Seppala & Friends
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| If straight men ran fashion, scarfs made from live sled dogs would be mandatory winter apparel. |
In 1925 there was an epidemic of diphtheria in Nome, and only 20 men could get the serum necessary to counteract it there on time. 20 men and 150 dogs, that is to say, since this implausibly cinematic race against time was achieved via sled dog relay. Most famous among the Chads who pulled this off was Leonhard Seppala, a Norwegian Kven famed for his expertise in sled racing. Per Mushing.com, to "save valuable time Leonhard risked the 20 mile sea ice crossing between Cap Denbigh and Point Dexter in a blinding blizzard". The same article cites temperatures as low as -64° for other participants, to say nothing of sleds flipped over by high winds and dogs suffering from "frozen groin". I think I had that once around the time they fired me from the morgue.
Francisco Franco
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| ywn rock drip this hard. You've been MOGGED, son. |
I'm going to take the TWISTED and DEMENTED position that the people in the Spanish civil war who raped nuns, crucified priests and buried people alive were the bad guys. Historians can debate ad nauseum on whether the election that would have delivered Spain into the dominion of these drooling psychopaths was rigged in the conventional sense, but the leftists' habit of dragging conservative members of the Spanish parliament out into the street and murdering them also counts as de facto election rigging, because (stay with me here) you can't actually vote to elect someone once they've been murdered by a communist. Generalissimo Franco was the only rightist to win anything in the 20th Century and, wildly not coincidentally, Spain was the only European country to be better off after WW2 than before it, perhaps because he had the good sense not to participate in it. Few men are objectively chosen by God to save their people from the most rancid and cartoonish evil imaginable, but our Frank was.
Timur
"Wait, surely not?" you say, in a posh Bri'ish accent, monocle falling from your face in surprise.
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| Pictured: you. |
Taylor Root
Random hiker Root was fortunate enough to catch on his GoPro camera his timely rescue of a lady hanging off a cliff, being held only by her daughter, who had one arm. While this sounds like the most made-up shit since Jussie Smollett's 3am MAGA Country ordeal, the footage proves it, unless enough people in the comments post "FAKE AND GAY"*. Root's story prompts us to adopt the Rodin's Thinker pose and contemplate the large degree to which heroism is just being in the right place at the right time. After all, wouldn't you feel kind of awkward if you just kept walking despite the amputee's increasingly desperate pleas for help? I mean I wouldn't, but I'm Pat Bastard. NONETHELESS, Root did the right thing, unless the lady he saved was secretly a big murderer or some shit, which is what I would assume, but I'm Pat Bastard.
Vlad III
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| The hero we need. |
My regulars will know that on this δ╝◙♀ we stan a spooky king, but did you know the historical Dracula was taken as a boy to serve the arch-nonce Mehmet II in his janissary corps, while his brother Radu became the loathsome sultan's personal rape-slave? Frankly, this origin story would have more than justified young Vlad becoming the comic book villain as which he's been immortalised, but instead he returned to the throne of Wallachia with only the most practical, Machiavellian, yet righteous plans in mind to cast off the Ottoman yoke, running an underdog campaign so effective that he could only be undone by the incessant treachery of his fat pig boyars and Matthias Corvinus.
But Vlad's domestic policies were as autismally righteous as his warfare: it is said that his impalement of criminal scumbags was so effective that he could leave a golden cup at a well and no one would dare take it. Another time, a merchant petitioned him to recover goods stolen from him. Vlad tracked down the thieves, mounted them on stakes, then had the merchant count out all the coin he had returned to him. Vlad had slipped an extra coin into the hoard to test the man, who luckily or wisely passed by reporting the extra coin as handed to him in error, at which point Vlad commended him and told him that he would have shared the fate of the initial thieves had he omitted to report the discrepancy. He then spent the rest of his evening drawing Sonic and playing with his train set. Based and wholesome!
Roman von Ungern-Sternberg
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| It is a little known fact Charles Manson ripped off his stare from my boi right here. |
History has known two great Mongolboos: myself and the good Baron von Ungern-Sternberg. In the 1910s, a lot of people listened to a 5'6" manlet named Lenin who looked like Satan and promised utopia could be achieved by murdering the Tsar and his family and anyone who supported them, springing all the rapists and murderers from prisons and arming them, and then starving to death. Anyone who could read knew this had already been tried in something called the French Revolution, but, fortunately for Satan, noone bothered to read actual history back then either, so the Red faction won, mostly by using terror tactics like picking 100 randos from a village and hanging them to scare the rest into submission, boiling people's hands and peeling the skin off and nailing it to the wall, and having rats eat their way through people's stomachs. Today, very sophisticated people will tell you that these guys were just idealists whose ideas need a little more fine-tuning.
It might well be imagined that anyone who survived this apocalyptic horror would have given in to despair and so ended, but, after much guerrilla-style service doing Jesse James tier train raids, the good Baron found a whole new lease of life fighting the Chinese in Mongolia, where he restored the Bogd Khan and was praised by the local people as a reincarnation of Chinggis Khan himself, from whom he had always very dubiously claimed descent by way of Temujin's grandson, Batu Khan. His supporters eventually got tired of his madladdery and abandoned him to be picked up by Reds, who executed him, but Outer Mongolia remains an independent nation to this day. Like Vlad, horror stories of the Baron's antics told by his seething h8rs proliferate unto the present, but we will always love him for the inspiration he provides: if at first you don't succeed, you can just go to Mongolia and become Khan.
Alfonso VIII of Castile
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| The face of one who's seen some shit. |
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