If you’ve been following the past few weeks’ posts or were redirected here from my Twitter account, then you’ve probably noticed that the past few pieces have a theme of revenge. I’ve never formally studied the concept, but I think that my fascination with it started when I was young. A lot of the entertainment I consumed had at least undertones of revenge: Starfox pursuing Andross for killing his father, Jack pursuing Aku to kill him, that episode of the Powerpuff Girls where Bubbles goes nuts and on Mojo Jojo to prove she’s hardcore because her sisters and peers made fun of her for being soft. All of it pretty light stuff, I think. 

	The first piece of entertainment that stands out pretty vividly to me is the Korean film, Old Boy. My sister showed it to me, I believe, in 2008 as I neared the end of my senior year of high school. I don’t want to give too much away, but I think that by the end, the characters were in positions that were deserved. Not necessarily from a moral standpoint or anything, but according to the events and backstories in the film. Which sounds really obvious, but sometimes there’s stories that include weird, out-of-left-field plots or solutions. 

	Regardless of all that, Old Boy became a standard for my entertainment consumption. I want to mention, though, that I’ve only really been able to articulate the guidelines for my standards in a vague way. Maybe it’s because the nature of entertainment is subjective, but I think it’s more because I’m not so well versed in what’s considered “fun” to a lot of people that my guidelines are skewed. There’s a weird disconnect that occurred with people when I was growing up, I think. But that’s a topic for another post. 

	Today, I’d like to have a small ramble about revenge. 

	There’s always at least two parties involved in revenge, right? The victim and the predator. The possibility of more parties being involved is there, but at its base, revenge always consists of those two parties. When these two parties are established, the victim has a motive for retaliation and begins forming a means of retaliation. 

        Three motives that I’m familiar with, and I think are in a lot of entertainment media, is a simple sort of revenge where the victim was harmed and therefore they will cause harm to their predator. Eye for an eye and all that. It’s extremely simple. As a side note, the first thing I think of when this revenge comes up is the horror genre; there’s something terrifying about someone who’s has such an intense tunnel vision. 

        The second motive I’m familiar with is poetic justice. A revenge plot carried out so that the predator meets either the equal or worse fate of a victim’s inflicted suffering. There’s a lot of stories that deal with this. I think that when I was younger I liked the idea of it. It felt good to see people who had been hurt get some sort of closure or peace. After all, I was one of the kids who got teased and bullied. Sometimes the treatment came from older family members who didn’t think much of it, most of the time it was from peers at school and around the neighborhood. So, at least to me right now, it makes sense that a younger me found comfort in seeing a victim getting the closure and peace that I wanted, even if the victims were made up and their entire story was fabricated. 

        The third type that I’m familiar with is honor revenge, where the victim tries to enact revenge on the predator to restore a status that was taken from them when the predator came into the picture. The first thing that I think of is history. Lots of stuff happened in the past where people felt disrespected and the only way to get back to their previous stature was to take the person who disrespected them down. Sort of a step on another person to get higher up, I suppose. 

	When I was younger, I was always more interested in the victim and their perspective. But after watching Old Boy, where they gave a little more detail into the predator’s story and reasons why they went on the course they did, I started thinking more about the predator’s motivations and trying to adopt a more neutral, observational stance in these stories. Maybe it was an attempt to be proactive against the pain that was to be inflicted on me, because I’d accepted that it was going to happen one way or another. In any case, the predator in revenge scenarios became something I thought about more often. I guess I wanted to know why, to at least have the peace of understanding what they were doing. Because people aren’t just completely random, right? They don’t act on things without having some sort of purpose or mentality behind their actions. When I considered that, I had to either accept that people were evil as a plain, simple fact or delve deeper into the complexities of why a cycle like revenge would even begin. 

        It’s probably clear, but I chose the latter of the two. 

        I clung onto fate for a while, thinking that there must be some cosmic force that’s pushing all that we do together. Then, I found that I agreed more with the theory that revenge happens according to a series of events that happened to the two involved parties individually. Maybe it’s both, maybe it’s neither, I’m not sure. But, that’s where I’m at with this whole thing - believing that we have more influence on one another than we give credit to. 

        I’m still puzzled by the benefits gained and mentality of risking harm inflicted on you coming back. But, people are complicated. I don’t even know all of myself, let alone other people and how they’re thinking or feeling or how they function. That’s probably one of the many reasons that I’m writing, to get a better understanding of people and how they function.