Historical Battle Shitposts / Decisive Victory

Submission 11,267

Part of a series on History Memes. [View Related Entries]

About

Historical Battle Shitposts, also known as Decisive Victory, refers to a series of history memes that involve humorously presenting historic battles or events or biographies of historic figures in a video or image format, often by combining lines from their Wikipedia articles and humorous imagery.

Origin

On December 11th, 2016, in a discussion on 4chan's /his/ board, an anonymous user posted^[1] a screenshot of Wikipedia's information box for the Battle of Siuyang, a 757 AD siege battle between the Chinese Tang and Yan dynasties for the city of Siuyang during which the besieged Tang forces cannibalized over 20,000 civilians (shown below, left). In the same thread, an anonymous user replied^[2] with a reaction image reading "20,000-30,000 civilians were eaten, Decisive Tang strategic victory" (shown below, right).

Spread

In the following years, the image was reposted on /his/^[3] and other boards,^[4] later spreading to Reddit,^[5] Facebook^[6] and other sites. The trend initially saw development in the form of sharing Wikipedia articles of unusual battles, often accompanied by reaction images. For example, prior to December 23rd, 2016, Tumblr^[7] user russdom posted a screenshot of the Wikipedia article for the 1998 Sokcho submarine incident (shown below, left).

Prior to June 16th, 2020, an unknown user created the earliest known video shitpost based on a Wikipedia article about a historic battle, a video about the bombing of Tokyo that combined lines from the Wikipedia article with both humorous and informative imagery. On June 16th, 2020, Instagram^[8] page unibrowwingism9kmk2 reposted the video (shown below), with more reposts of the video made between 2020 and 2021.

On December 12th, 2021, YouTuber^[9] MasterofRoflness posted a similar video edit about the Battle of Siuyang, which received over 1 million views in four months (shown below).

In the following months, MasterofRoflness uploaded multiple Historic Battle Shitposts to YouTube, including videos about historic battles and historic figures.

Additionally, image macros of historic figures combined with the snowclone "Decisive X victory" saw use online as reaction images.