Vengeance is something we all want at one point in one way or another. Maybe we just absolutely hate that girl who keeps answering questions in class before we can and taking our thunder. Or that guy that ratted us out for writing graffiti has it coming to him. Or we are just plain sick and tired of being told how or what to do by someone and want to put them in our shoes for a change.
Because Revenge is such an easy emotional response for people to relate to it only makes sense that it would work its way into our culture, especially in arts such as books and movies. This fact that revenge can be related to so easily has been taken advantage of though to a point that it has almost become a cliche and a cheap cop out for writers who need to create motivation.
This is usually seen with antagonist. Making villains for stories can be hard sometimes, usually a lot more difficult than creating protagonist. You need to make the antagonist a reasonable threat so that there is a sense of peril, you have to flesh them out as characters and so many more steps to actually create a good bad guy. Possibly the most important development of the antagonist is their motivation. Readers and viewers are going to have trouble connecting to the story if they can not understood why the antagonist is who they are and does what they do. One of the easiest ways to lose an audience interest is to not explain character motivations. This leads to plot holes that ruin any sense of immersion by making your audience stop to ask "why". Every good story should leave the audience with food for thought and a reason to ask questions, but those questions should not take away from the immersion.
It is so easy to make an antagonist motivation simply be Revenge. The protagonist did something bad to the and now they are going to punish them for that. It sounds like a simple and easy to follow plot that anyone could relate to. Hence the problem. It is such an easy to follow idea that once you have seen it once you have seen it a million times and chances are if you watch enough movies or read enough books, you will see it a million times.
Just as it can be too simple to use as a motivation, Revenge can also be incredibly complicated and unreasonable. So many times the villains only goal is to stop the antagonist or defeat them. And then what? Nothing. There is no resolution past that. You can not build a truly competent character off of pure revenge and them across as a threat. It is just entirely unreasonable and it makes the conflict so dull. What is there to lose really if the antagonist gets their revenge? Yeah, the protagonist loses something, heck maybe they even die, but what other effect is there? What reason does the audience have to care when it is over with? What reason does the antagonist have to care!?
Now I am not saying that every Revenge based plot is awful or that they should be completely stripped from stories. What I am saying is that Revenge plots need to be used more competently and as more than just get out of jail free cards for making baddies do bad things or goodies do good things. There are so many ways to make Revenge plots interesting that people just do not use. One idea is to follow the Moby Dick style and have the antagonist or protagonist go bonkers with obsession over their revenge. Another could be to keep the reason for the antagonist wanting revenge a secret and it turning out that the protagonist has actually done something truly wrong in the past and is now going to pay for it, thus building up both characters and keeping the audience intrigued. Heck, you could actually let the revenge play out just have there be more at stake and better development. It will still be a run of the mill revenge plot, but at least it was a good one.
People can only relate to so much and as the art of story writing and developing books and films becomes more available to the general public there are going to be more and more uses of the same ideas over and over. It is important that for us to continue to create great stories that we want to revisit and become truly involved in we must find ways to break the mold by not falling for cliches or turning cliches into something more.
