From family man to murderous avenger.
When Alexandre Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo in the early 1840s, he codified an archetypal revenge story that follows particular beats:
- The protagonist begins as a total innocent with a charmed or at least happy life, often in love and occasionally even with a family (or a baby on the way, for extra pathos).
- The protagonist's life is then ruined by most typically a group of antagonists who all have various reasons for wanting them out of the picture. The protagonist doesn't just lose everything — they're removed from their own life, often to exile or prison or even a combination of both (e.g., in the original novel, Edmond Dantes being imprisoned in the Chateau d'If penal colony). A common variation, especially in sci-fi or horror stories, replaces this step with social exile by inflicting Body Horror on the protagonist — they may not literally be imprisoned or exiled, but their new scarred (or even monstrous) form makes it difficult for them to return to a normal life. Fantasy variations may have the protagonist actually die, reincarnate, and take up the path of revenge for their suffering in their former life after regaining their previous life's memories.
- This Break the Cutie experience sends the protagonist down a path From Nobody to Nightmare, where they hone their skills and harden their hearts in exile.
- The protagonist escapes (or more rarely, is simply released) from exile or captivity and makes their way back to where they started, in many cases having changed their name and often with newly acquired vast wealth to back them up.
- Under their new identity or by taking advantage of their new obscurity, the protagonist sets out to systematically destroy their former oppressors, sometimes with the help of new allies (whether they're the Token Good Teammate or a Psycho Supporter).
- They also frequently discover their family or lovers are now in the grasp of the same villains who wronged them all those years ago.
- Alas, the protagonist often falls prey to He Who Fights Monsters, frequently seeing other people (including his enemies' innocent children, as in the original novel) as mere obstacles on their path to justice. More idealistic works will have them realize the error of their ways, while more cynical ones will use the protagonist as an illustration of Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and a Protagonist Journey to Villain.
While this plotline obviously applies to direct adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo, its general beats have inspired an entire subgenre of revenge stories that don't directly adapt it — perhaps the first new major codification after the Renaissance revenge tragedy genre, which focuses more on the Cycle of Revenge and A Tragedy of Impulsiveness tropes.
A popular variant is to show the trope from the other side, with the antagonists trying to figure out why this mysterious newcomer has it out for them, or with the revenger as a genuine villain using their new resources and identity on a group of people who never meant to harm them and only did so by tragic accident.
Compare to Charlie Brown from Outta Town, where a disgraced face wrestler comes back in a flimsy disguise to get back at the heel that brought them down. A character who embarks on this plot might have Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook, with the character relating that the years since they and the antagonists first met have changed them. Subtrope of Revenge.
A Sister Trope to The Hero's Journey, where many of the same story beats occur, but where The Protagonist is a good guy called to adventure rather than an Anti-Hero seeking revenge.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Code Geass: After being disowned from the royal family of Britannia following the assassination of his mother and his sister being blinded and crippled, Lelouch Lamperouge stumbles upon a mysterious woman who gifts him with a Magical Eye, which culminates in him assuming the identity of Zero and joining a group of rebels plotting to overthrow the empire. His quest for revenge leads to him going up against his own childhood friend and causing innocent lives to be ruined or ended by the crossfire, among other consequences.
- Gankutsuou is an animated adaptation of Monte Cristo with a sci-fi lens, with all the revenge implied, and then some. It emphasizes the He Who Fights Monsters element by showing how terrifying the Count's campaign of revenge is to everyone in his reach.
- Double subverted in Oshi no Ko, which has a very unusual take on the plot beats. A pop idol fan is murdered right before his favorite idol, who he was looking after at the hospital where he worked, gives birth to twins, with him reincarnating as the boy of the pair (how's that for a change of identity?). At first, he comes to enjoy his new life as the son of his favorite idol, but after she is murdered by a jealous fan, he becomes convinced that there's a bigger conspiracy at play and decides to pursue a career in the entertainment industry in order to get revenge on the mastermind.
Comic Books
- V for Vendetta: The titular V was an inmate at Larkhill Resettlement Camp, one of many extermination camps run by Norsefire, a fascist dictatorship that rules Great Britain. V was one of a group of prisoners that were subjected to horrific medical experimentation, which resulted in the deaths of all the prisoners except him. The experiments gave V the physical abilities of an Olympic athlete in addition to a genius-level intellect. V eventually destroys Larkhill with a bomb of his own creation and dons a Guy Fawkes mask and costume. V spends the next five years planning revenge against Norsefire while building his secret base which he names "The Shadow Gallery". He also kills the surviving personnel of Larkhill, making each murder look like an accident. In a twist, we never do find out who V was before Larkhill — but all signs point to him having been a random innocent targeted by their cruelty.
Film — Live-Action
- The Abominable Dr. Phibes: Dr Anton Phibes, disfigured and thought dead in an accident, comes back for revenge against every member of the team of surgeons he blames for his wife's death on the operating table. Disguising his scarred face with a mask, he sets out to murder them one by one, theming the killings around the plagues of Egypt. A more villainous example than most, both because it's not clear that the surgeons actually did anything wrong, and because one of the plagues of Egypt was the death of the firstborn son...
- Darkman is a prime example of the Body Horror variation on the plot. Dr. Peyton Westlake is never sent to prison or captured by the men who destroyed his life, but he's horrifically burned and left with almost nothing of his former lab, and then subjected to medical torture by an unrelated group of doctors when he's found as an unrecognizable husk of himself. His brilliance is undiminished, however, and he uses his skills at disguise and post-torture insensitivity to pain to systematically destroy the gangsters who ruined his life and now both court and threaten his former fiancee under his new persona as the titular Anti-Hero.
- Deadpool: The film has almost the same plot as Darkman, but with a quirky sense of humor. Hitman for hire Wade Wilson is disfigured and driven insane by an experimental cancer treatment at the hands of the evil gangster Ajax, and he sets out in a new full-body costume to both build up his mercenary career and take down Ajax's empire, while eventually reuniting with his fiancee Vanessa. Unlike Darkman, he's successful.
- High Plains Drifter: The end of the film heavily implies that The Stranger, played by Clint Eastwood, was the betrayed and murdered sheriff who was there for vengeance against both the Carlin's, who killed him, and the town itself, who sold him out to the Carlin's when he was going to shut down a gold mine on government land.
- Implied in Mad Max: Fury Road. Imperator Furiosa holds an important role in Immortan Joe's domain, and he clearly knows her as Furiosa, but she snarls, "Remember me?" in his face, to his great alarm, right before she kills him. The tie-in comics have the Five Wives guess that Furiosa was once herself a wife, cast out into the wasteland for failing to produce a healthy son for Joe, but Furiosa is silent in response. Joe's wives are chosen for their beauty and physical perfection, so it stands to reason that he wouldn't recognize if one of them came back as a one-armed soldier with a buzz cut.
- The Mask of Zorro: Don Diego was once the heroic outlaw Zorro who battled against tyranny and fought for the people while living a happy civilian life with a wife and child. However, after his final mission, he's outed by Don Rafael Montero and in the battle, his wife is killed, his daughter is taken from him, and Diego is put in prison for twenty years. After all those years, Montero returns, spurring Diego into action once again, escaping his prison and finding a new ally in Alejandro whom he trains as his successor. He also discovers that his daughter has grown up under his enemy Montero whom she considers her father. What's notable, however, is that his successor is even more fixated on revenge against The Dragon for killing his brother while Diego, despite being vengeful against Montero for ruining his life, has to rein in the new Zorro's anger and help him focus on the mission.
- Om Shanti Om: Struggling actor Om Prakash dies after attempting to rescue his friend Shanti, with whom he is secretly in love, from the fire set by her villainous secret husband. Shanti dies in the blaze, and Om nearly makes it to the hospital but is run over by accident by another actor, Rajesh Kapoor, whose wife is going into labor. Om Prakash dies of his injuries and is reincarnated into Rajesh Kapoor's newborn son, Om "OK" Kapoor, who grows up to be a successful actor. After a fire on the set of his latest film causes OK to remember his past life, he decides to wring the truth out of Shanti's murderer, Hamlet-style, by resuming production on the film she and Om Prakash were shooting when she died- including hiring an unknown young actress named Sandy who looks just as much like Shanti as OK looks like Om Prakash... Subverted for Sandy specifically- she's not Shanti's reincarnation after all. In fact, Shanti ended up a ghost perfectly capable of revenge in her own right.
- Skyfall features the inverted version where the revenger is the villain. MI6, and M in particular, are targeted by a mysterious terrorist named Raul Silva, whom James Bond discovers lives a life of luxury on a private island with henchmen to spare when he tracks him down. When Silva ends up in MI6 custody, he asks to personally speak to M, where he reveals that he's a former agent of hers whom she refused to rescue from torture when he was captured on a mission because he was too much of a liability. He tried to kill himself with a Cyanide Pill in his tooth, but it only destroyed the bones in one side of his face, requiring him to wear a prosthetic jawnote . In Silva's words, "life clung to [him] like a disease," and his abandonment by M, whom he saw as a mother figure, lead him to live for nothing but revenge on her and anyone who gets in his way. Bond, whom M also nearly had to leave for dead on a recent mission, is scornful of Silva but clearly shaken up by the realization of how easily he could have become him — especially when M casually confirms that what Silva said was true and that she knows his real name (Tiago Rodriguez).
- Sky High: Royal Pain was thought to be defeated by The Commander and Jetstream, Will's parents, many years ago. In reality, her Pacifier ray backfired on her and turned her into an infant. She was raised by her evil minion, seemingly either retaining or regaining her old memories of being the misunderstood Sidekick-track Sue Tenny. With her technopath powers now better recognized as Hero material at Sky High, she crafted a new identity as popular Gwen Grayson, waiting for the opportunity to get revenge on The Commander, Jetstream, and everyone else at Sky High who didn't see her potential as Sue Tenny. When the duo's son Will Stronghold gets into the Hero track, she flirts with him in order to get access to his parents' lair, where they kept The Pacifier. Then she comes up with a Hero of the Year award for the homecoming dance, inviting the Commander and Jetstream, and starts turning everyone there into babies whom she will raise to be evil. However, she is defeated by Will and his Sidekick friends.
- Star Trek Beyond reveals that the villainous Krall and his minions are actually what's become of Federation Captain Balthasar Edison after being left to die and mutate in space over a few hundred years. Broken and blaming the Federation for stranding him, a warrior, to suffer and gradually become a monster amidst a stagnant peace, the present-day heroes of the USS Enterprise- who had nothing to do with what became of Edison- are forced to fight against him.
- The Strays plays with this trope by mixing up the roles in the archetypal plot. Cheryl, a light-skinned Black woman, flees her abusive boyfriend, and when we next meet her years later, she's living in the suburbs, has changed her name to Neve, wears straight wigs, is married to a white man, and has two even lighter-skinned mixed-race children. Everything would be perfect if she and her children weren't apparently being stalked by two Black teenagers — except it turns out the teens are the children she abandoned from her first relationship when she set out to become Neve, and they've only been working their way into Cheryl/Neve's life to reunite with her. Where this trope comes into play is when Neve learns her son Carl ended up in and out of several mental institutions, while her daughter Dione ended up The Ophelia, and instead of accepting them back into her life tries to pay them off to leave her alone. Carl and Dione respond with a house invasion, in which they kill Neve's husband — and Neve, in a moment of panic, abandons not only Carl and Dione but her and Ian's children Mary and Sebastian, too, potentially restarting the whole cycle.
- Theatre of Blood: Shakespearian actor Edward Lionheart (who while egotistical seems to have been a loving father who never actually harmed anyone prior to the events of the film) was Driven to Suicide by a group of critics who denied him an award and cruelly mocked him even when he was clearly suicidal. He survives the suicide attempt and returns two years later, presumed dead and using various disguises, and sets out to kill the critics one by one, theming the murders around deaths from Shakespeare plays. This film and the other Vincent Price film themed around this trope, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, was cited by Alan Moore as inspiring V for Vendetta.
Literature
- The Trope Codifier is, as mentioned above, The Count of Monte Cristo. Naïve young sailor Edmond Dantes is thrown into a penal colony due to the machinations of a False Friend and various other ambitious miscreants. He learns of a great treasure from his cellmate, escapes after several years of captivity by faking his own death, and returns to his hometown as the fabulously wealthy and mysterious Count of Monte Cristo in order to take his revenge on the men who destroyed his life, only to encounter serious complications in the discovery that their kids are, generally speaking, nice young people who don't deserve to be tied up in his vengeance on their families. When his schemes lead to a woman poisoning her child and herself, the Count realises the immense cost of his vengeance and decides to let his last target live (though not without depriving him of much of his fortune).
- El Filibusterismo is inspired from The Count of Monte Cristo which Jose Rizal had read before. The protagonist, Crisostomo Ibarra, who is supposed to be dead at the end of Noli Me Tangere, returns to the Philippines to rescue his beloved Maria Clara and secretly plot to start a revolution against the Spaniards for the humiliation that he suffered in the first novel which led to his separation from Maria Clara.
- Mathias Sandorf
(or Mathias Sandor) is Jules Verne's take on the plot. A Hungarian patriot, Mathias Sandorf, is involved in a plot to liberate Hungary from the Austrian rule. The plot is betrayed, the other conspirators are executed but Mathias Sandorf escapes by faking his death. Fifteen years later he returns under an assumed name, with immense wealth and almost supernatural psychic abilities, to take revenge on those who betrayed him. Verne dedicated the book to Dumas.
- In A Prisoner of Birth, the protagonist gets framed by the antagonists (a group which calls themselves The Musketeers and ironically are fans of Alexandre Dumas's works) for a murder one of them committed. In prison, he meets a rich Identical Stranger, who becomes his friend. When the latter is murdered, the former takes his place, and when released from prison he takes revenge on the antagonists.
- Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination moves the plot into outer space, with simpleminded Gully Foyle becoming a dangerously sharp, vengeful monster after being abandoned to die.
- Stephen Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls is a modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, with Ned Maddstone returning from 13 years in an asylum in Sweden as internet billionaire Simon Cotter to enact his vengeance on his former schoolmates who sent him there.
- Vendetta! (1886) by Marie Corelli compresses the plot into the result of only one night, with Fabio Romani experiencing Rapid Aging after being Buried Alive and stumbling on the discovery that his wife and best friend were all too eager to see him gone. He takes on a new identity to get his revenge on them.
Live-Action TV
- Revenge (2011) is one big love letter to this trope and The Count of Monte Cristo. Amanda Clarke returns to her old Hamptons neighborhood after reinventing herself as Emily Thorne in order to get back at the people who tore her away from her father as a child after setting him up as the fall guy for their own criminal actions.
Music
- Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan" is an ominous, cryptic ode to vengeance from the perspective of someone who was "sentenced[...] to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within" and is now "coming to reward them". While Cohen never went into much detail explaining it, beyond describing it as a "terrorist song", the lyrics suggest here and there that the narrator went through this kind of plot:
- "I'm guided by a signal in the heavens/I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin/I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons..."
- "I don't like what happened to my sister..."
- "Ah, you loved me as a loser/but now you're worried that I just might win/You know the way to stop me/but you don't have the discipline/How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin..."
- "I thank you for those items that you sent me/the monkey and the plywood violin/I've practiced every night/and now I'm ready..."
- "Remember me? I used to live for music./Remember me? I brought your groceries in./Well, it's Father's Day, and everybody's wounded..."
Theatre
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street:
- The play uses this plot type to make the legendary title figure an Anti-Villain instead of the greedy monster he was in his first appearance by making him a heartbroken avenger of his late wife and kidnapped daughter when he returns to London after fifteen years in an Australian penal colony. Murder, madness, and meat pies ensue.
- By extension, The Horror Of Dolores Roach transplants the Sweeney Todd story to modern-day New York City, with a female masseuse in the lead instead of a male barber.
- The Visit (Der Besuch von Alten Dame, "The Old Lady's Visit") by Friedrich Durrenmatt has Claire Zachnassian, the richest woman in the world, returning to the poverty-stricken hometown where she was once sweet, innocent little Klari, intent on forcing the townspeople who had her exiled as a whore when her lover Alfred Ill wouldn't accept paternity of their child (leading to the baby's subsequent death by freezing when Klari had to work as a prostitute in a big city to survive, and Claire's current disability) into killing Alfred in exchange for her relieving their financial woes. Said woes only exist because after Claire got rich, she bought and ruined the town herself through a series of shell corporations to ensure the townspeople would be desperate enough to do anything for money.
Video Games
- In Final Fantasy XIV, Aldis was known as the "Sword of Nald" and one of the finest gladiators Ul'dah has ever known. But after being the subject of a Frame-Up, he became persona non grata in his native city and left for years, with most assuming he died. He returns in the Gladiator questline to dismantle the operations of the Alacran, who are being led by his former friend the one who framed him, Leavold. While he maintains a chipper, laidback exterior, he curb-stomps the assassins sent after him in droves before cornering Leavold himself.
Webcomics
- The Warrior Returns:
- Jeongsu watches his entire family get murdered by Minsu, the Sword Warrior, before being killed by Minsu as well. Instead of dying, Jeongsu is Trapped in Another World for a year, during which he becomes the Spear Warrior and devotes all of his time to training to become strong enough to avenge his family by torturing and killing Minsu. By the time Jeongsu returns, South Korea has been taken over by the nine disgruntled Warriors who all hit the Despair Event Horizon, with Jeongsu becoming known as the Rebel Warrior for being the only South Korean Warrior capable of fighting and killing them.
- This is also the backstory of Uiho Jeong, the Iron Arm Warrior. Prior to getting sent to another world, he was the victim of intense bullying and wound up committing suicide to get away from them. Upon his return as The Juggernaut, his first order of business was to gruesomely murder his bullies, who failed to recognize him because his time in the other world drastically changed his appearance.
