Revenge Isn't Everything

Stressful week! Changing plans, lack of contact, and an alarming number of drivers who don’t use turning signals. All very distressing!

Anyhow, I don’t know what’s going on with Burn Notice on Hulu, as it no longer says it’s going off the streamer soon. I did notice that the Disney Percy Jackson series is on Hulu right now, though, and now Turn is back on Netflix. Not sure how much longer I’ll be doing LEGO Star Wars, as there are over a thousand kyber bricks, and, uh, I don’t know if I care that much.

Revenge Isn’t Everything

[That’s a Dishonored reference, by the way.]

Do you remember how I said that a lot of writers, if they don’t know what to do to make a character sympathetic, will half-write in a love interest with little chemistry or personality, and expect it to work? It’s why so many romantic arcs in pop fiction fall flat.

Anyhow! I’m here to suggest another feature of quick-and-easy writing: revenge as motivation. Need a quick backstory? Here’s REVENGE! The bad guys killed his or her family or whatever, and the protagonist needs to go kill them all. And yeah, it’s satisfying for the audience, but, uh… it’s kind of shallow as a motivation, innit? Or rather, it can be.

Obviously, I’m not talking about something like The Count of Monte Cristo–that’s a much more complex case than, “They killed my X”, and the story is developed and complicated enough that it works–though it does try to end with the message that revenge is bad, which is a little hard to swallow after reading an awesome story about how awesome revenge is.

I’m also of the opinion that it’s a little more forgivable in video games as a motivation for protagonists–though I’d dearly wish they’d stop using it in Assassin’s Creed given how many games there are. In action games, you need the player to be driven to want to commit violence against specific enemies, and one way to do that is get them wanting to do some revenge. Make it personal for the player, and they’ll want to do it.

And I also understand that there are settings and story types where violence is fairly common. A fantasy medieval world, or a story about gangs, or something like that–violence is going to happen, so it’s not too unbelievable that it leads someone wanting revenge. It feels fairly natural. But in those stories there’s often a lot going on, and so boiling it down to ‘Guy wants revenge’ is always going to feel a little… well, simplistic?

Like with love interests, it’s not a bad story idea, it’s just that it’s been done to death, and usually in a way that’s so basic. The protagonist wants revenge. Okay, fine; what else have you got to cook with? Can you give me something else? Can you do something else to make the story unique?

We’re able to look past this, because sometimes, we just want a simple action story. I guess that’s okay. At the same time, I want people to really start thinking about doing other kinds of story, or to look at revenge stories and think about how they can stand out. It’s weird, because the ultimate revenge story, The Count of Monte Cristo, is sitting right there, and relatively few stories really want to build off of that example. Instead, they want to do a basic mob-type story of, “These guys killed my family/wife/whatever, now I go kill them.” It’s like the video game examples, but people, we don’t need that in books, since we’re not controlling the protagonist, so we don’t need to feel as strongly that we should agree with what he or she is doing in the story.

[Though I caution against alienating the audience too much with the protagonist.]

“I want revenge”! So what? What makes this revenge story different from any other? What makes this character memorable? In settings where the villains hurt so many people, give me a reason to think that THIS person’s grief and wrath are much more interesting than anyone else’s in this story!

And do think these things through, will you? Characters can be blinded by rage, sure, but don’t make them stupid. There’s a particularly notable scene in the horrible animated series Twilight of the Gods in which one character asks, “Wait, if we kill Thor, will that throw the weather out of whack? Will Valhalla still be there?” Which seems like a great question to ask before you commit your souls to a revenge quest against the god of thunder, right?

Revenge stories aren’t necessarily bad, or anything like that–but they’re so common now, and I wish they weren’t the default for so many stories, as if we couldn’t care about a character in an action story unless he or she had a Revenge Plot going on.

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