| rdfs:comment
| - At last, the moment for which you have trained for the better part of your life is at hand. You have finally tracked down and critically wounded the person who slew your mentor before your eyes when you were but a helpless child. Just as you prepare to administer the final blow, you can not help but indulge your curiosity to find out why this monster killed your beloved mentor. As it turns out, master was not always so squeaky clean. In his youth, he did some unspeakable evil unto this individual's community, if not upon this person's very family. Before you can even make a choice, Fate makes one for you and he dies of his injuries all on his own...okay, with some help from you beforehand. Whoops!
|
| abstract
| - At last, the moment for which you have trained for the better part of your life is at hand. You have finally tracked down and critically wounded the person who slew your mentor before your eyes when you were but a helpless child. Just as you prepare to administer the final blow, you can not help but indulge your curiosity to find out why this monster killed your beloved mentor. As it turns out, master was not always so squeaky clean. In his youth, he did some unspeakable evil unto this individual's community, if not upon this person's very family. Before you can even make a choice, Fate makes one for you and he dies of his injuries all on his own...okay, with some help from you beforehand. Whoops! Now, you've got his entire extended family howling for your blood, and his friends are after a piece of you as well. No doubt your own kin and friends are willing to get back at whoever kills you. Congratulations (you hardly deserve one, in this case), you've just perpetuated a Blood Feud! This is one of those things that less idealistic revenge stories (as idealistic as revenge stories get, anyhow) dabble in, that being the idea that revenge is rarely ever sweet. Because of the complex web of genetic and social bonds that one forms over a lifetime, as well as the interactions between everyone entangled in that web, revenge might well begin with you but it most likely will not end with you. No side is completely wrong, no one is really right, both are very understandable, and such stories are usually painful to watch. It's very common in gangster stories, with the average gangster character avenging the death of a friend upon a rival gangster who may very well have had a similar motivation for his killing, as well as Romeo and Juliet style Feuding Families stories. A lesser form of this tends to occur when two characters get into a prank war. Moral Myopia often deepens it, when both sides think that one of theirs is worth a dozen of the others, and so attempt to inflict that many deaths in retribution. The escalating body count creates a vicious circle. Very unfortunate Truth in Television, and Older Than Feudalism; the cycle of vengeance upon vengeance makes up much of the history of the human race, with examples like the infamous Hatfield/McCoy feud and current blood feuds in Albania and elsewhere that are still going on to this very day, with no one remembering just what started it, but motivated by all the violence that followed, with each successive revenge motivating the victims or others connected to them to strike back at the one who took the initial revenge. It is a very vicious cycle. A note on the "eye for an eye" maxim: many ethnologists believe that this wasn't a demand to go out and seek revenge, but rather a limit on how much revenge that one could exact (so if someone blinds you in one eye, you can't kill them, but at most half-blind them back). According to this theory, those who laid down this rule hoped that this limitation would put a brake on the development of such vicious cycles. According to another theory, espoused by Jewish rabbis, the Hebrew actually implies that monetary compensation is to be given in place of the eye, with the amount of the compensation to be the same regardless of whose eye was harmed (hence, "eye for an eye"). Unfortunately, given human nature in general, people didn't much listen, and as a result - as Mahatma Gandhi, a well-known nonviolence activist, is supposed to have put it - "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Kind of makes you wish someone learned to Turn the Other Cheek or ask for (and give) Forgiveness or at least just deliver a Restrained Revenge. Or you could just exterminate the opposing party until there's not anyone left to want revenge on you. But it rarely works, because there's always a survivor. See Best Served Cold, Feuding Families, He Who Fights Monsters, Remember the Alamo!, Revenge Myopia, Roaring Rampage of Revenge, Then Let Me Be Evil, and You Killed My Father. Reciprocal altruism (and, indeed, friendship in general) is quite possibly the flip side of this coin. Examples of Cycle of Revenge include:
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)