King Naresuan was a badass warlord who, while he was the reigning King of Thailand, won freedom for his people and fought off a foreign invasion by battling a tyrannical enemy king in a goddamned swordfight fought on the back of two rampaging elephants.
The tale begins in the mid-1560s, when the power-hungry King of the neighboring realm of Burma invaded Thailand, murdered the ass out of the Thai army, conquered their capital, took out the Thai King, sold half the population of the kingdom into slavery, and then rode back to Burma with Prince Naresuan as a prisoner. The grandson of the Thai King, Prince Naresuan grew up far from home, in the royal court of Burma, spending his formative years studying alongside the Burmese nobility. When this guy wasn't seething about the treatment of his family and his beloved Thai people, he was hardcore feuding with the Burmese Crown Prince – an almost-equally tough young man who was about the same age as Prince Naresuan yet almost constantly acted like a giant dickbag to him whenever possible. Basically he was like the Malfoy to Naresuan 's Harry Potter.
Well despite having to put up with that asshole's obnoxious overly-self-entitled douchebag bullshit Naresuan sucked it up and made the most of his time as a hostage, spending every waking hour studying military tactics from Burma's greatest generals and training in groin-kickingly-hardcore martial arts that would (I think) eventually be developed into Muay Thai Kickboxing – a fighting style I think we can all agree ranks among the most badass in the world.