Cycles of Revenge in Literature.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons are engaged in a 30-year feud, the origins of which are long since forgotten.
- Age of Fire: A recurring theme throughout the series, but especially highlighted in Dragon Avenger. Wistala eventually tries to end this in regards to the Dragonblade line by making peace with the current one and his family, rather than take revenge on him for killing her father.
- The hat of the Arends in the Belgariad. Polgara nearly falls into it herself in the prequel novel, but is strongly encouraged not to by her mother.
- Discussed or played straight several times in Beowulf: The "Finnsburgh fragment" is a Nested Story about a feud between Jutes and Frisians, Beowulf himself predicts that peace between Danes and Heathobards will not be lasting because of this, and a subplot revolves around the traditional enmity of Geats and Swedes.
- Blowing Up the Movies: The Kung Fu Hustle essay focuses on this, particularly the "feuding martial arts schools" subtrope.
- In Saberhagen's The Fourth Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer's Story The magical sword Farslayer, which can kill anyone from any distance, is hurled back and forth between two feuding families until only a few children are left alive.
- Awareness of this trope, and a desire to avert it, is the reason beyond a particularly unsavory aspect of A Brother's Price. Families tend to be tightly-knit and very collective. It would be easy for a family caught committing treason to pin it on one sister, who would be executed and leave the others alive and wanting vengeance. So, unless it's believed that this was not a proper family and sisters were not united — as happened to the Whistlers well before the story's start — the whole family is killed. Right down to the babies. Men — and Princess Ren — hate this practice, and it's well-established that Children Are Innocent of their parents' crimes, but it's seen as ruthlessly pragmatic."Face the truth, Ren. She's the incestuous fruit of the man who poisoned the Prince Consort and the woman who blew up half the royal princesses! Do you think any of even her most remote noble relations are going to take her? Do you think we're going to take her? You would ask our youngest to be raised with her? Her father murdered ours. Do you think our babies would be safe around her once she realized that we executed her mothers and grandmothers? [...] Kij and Keifer had no good reason to hate you and me, except for deeds of our grandmothers. Do you really want their child, with better reasons for hating us, anywhere near our children?"
- The descendents of the surviving Whistlers bear no grudge against the crowns, and in fact some of them died fighting for the same people who executed their Mother Elder. They adopt a traitor's child out of the charitable belief that there is redemption for the innocent.
- Even Dr. Seuss got in on this with The Butter Battle Book, a criticism of the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction.
- Another short story by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado", has the narrator lampshade the trope and strive to avert it; he notes that "I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser." And indeed, he gets away with his horrific revenge on Fortunato.
- The Corsican Brothers (The original, not the Cheech and Chong lampoon!).
- Cruel Illusions: The first vampire Numerius killed Lucius' sister after he first became a vampire. Lucius responded to this by killing Numerius' sister. The two have now spent centuries as archfoes trying to hurt each other more and more. It's escalated to the point that their organizations (Lucius' Society of Magicians and Numerius's vampires) are now in constant conflict with each other.
- Preventing this is a big part of the plot of The Spider's War, the last book of The Dagger and the Coin series. The tide of the war had actually begun to turn against Antea in the previous book, and the armies of Elassae and Sarakal are closing in during most of the fifth book, but even though the Anteans had committed horrible atrocities against the innocent people of those two countries, and even though the spider priests were not entirely to blame for everything the Anteans had done, Cithrin and the other heroes spend much of the book trying to figure out a way to get the Elassans and Sarakalese to forswear revenge, precisely to prevent it from leading to another war down the line.
- A recurring footnote in any Discworld book discussing Dwarf/Troll relations explains that war cries such as "Remember Koom Valley!" all tend to translate to "Let us remember the atrocity committed against us in the past that will excuse the atrocity we are about to commit today!" Thud!! in particular focuses on this theme, and particularly on an attempt at breaking the cycle. At its very beginning.
- Dune:
- By the time of the first Dune novel, the Atreides and Harkonnen families had been feuding for millenia, and the feud only ended with the death of Feyd, Rabban and Vladimir (the last surviving members of the Harkonnen family, not counting Vladimir's unacknowledged daughter Jessica and her Atreides descendants) at the end of the book. Accoriding to the first book, the feud apparently started because at some point thousands of years earlier, an Atreides had a Harkonnen banished for cowardice.
- The prequels of questionable canonicity expand upon the origins of the feud. Xavier Harkonnen and Vorian Atreides were friends. Xavier then dies, and his name is dragged through the mud as a traitor by politicians. Vorian knows the truth but conceals it for the good of the Butlerian Jihad. One of Xavier's grandkids, Abulurd Butler, starts looking up to Vorian. Later, Vorian reveals the truth to him, and Abulurd publicly changes his last name to Harkonnen. During the final Battle of Corrin, Abulurd sabotages the controls of the fleet in order to avoid causing the deaths of millions of human slaves, since Vorian was determined to destroy the machines once and for all at that point, no matter the cost. Instead of understanding his protege's actions, Vorian labeled him a coward and had him exiled to the icy Lankiveil. Embittered, Abulurd indoctrinated his children to hate the Atreides, starting the feud. Abulurd's grandson Griffin seeks out the Long-Lived Vorian and tries to kill him, but Vorian manages to befriend the boy. Unfortunately, just then, Vorian's android siblings catch up to him and offhandedly kill Griffin as a witness. Distraught, Vorian sends Griffin's body back to his family with words of sorrow. However, Griffin's sister Valya (already hateful of Vorian) interprets the words as mockery and assumes Vorian killed her brother. She joins the Sisterhood and, eventually, becomes its Mother Superior, using it to advance her goals of lifting up her House and getting revenge on the Atreides. She trains her younger sister Tula and sends her to Caladan, where Tula marries and then kills Vorian's descendant Orry. Orry's brother Willem joins Vorian on the hunt for Tula. They travel to Lankiveil, confronting Tula's family, but Vorian prevents Willem from exacting revenge on innocents. In the end, Valya and Tula confront Vorian and Willem on Corrin, where Vorian is seemingly killed in an explosion. In fact, Vorian survives but opts to stay in hiding in order to end the feud. Satisfied, Valya and Tula leave (Willem can't bring himself to kill Tula, who is pregnant with his brother's child). Willem travels to Salusa Secundus and becomes a member of Emperor Roderick's court... alongside Valya's other brother Danvis. Willem immediately starts plotting a way to kill Danvis in revenge for Vorian.
- This is a key part of the first two arcs of the Elemental Assassin novels. Mab Monroe killed the family of Genevieve Snow, so she grew up to be the assassin Gin Blanco and killed Mab. Then Mab's daughter Madeline comes to town and seeks revenge for the death of her parents (the father was another casualty of the Snow/Monroe feud). When Gin finally defeats her, she learns that Madeline has a young daughter, but refuses to end the cycle by eradicating the Monroe line, instead arranging for the child to be returned to his father's custody. When asked if this was a good idea, Gin replies that they'll find out in twenty years or so.
- In the Fear Street series, the root of Shadyside's problems is the centuries-long feud between the Fear/Fier family and the Goode family because of major Sins of Our Fathers. In the late 1600s, the Fier brothers pulled a Burn the Witch! on the innocent Susannah Goode. Susannah's father, the actual witch, then cursed the Fier family to forever suffer. One of the grandsons of the brothers grew up believing the Goodes were witches bent on his family's destruction for no reason, and thusly spent his own life chasing the remnants of them down to kill them in revenge. His son put a 100-year stop to the curse by burying the family's cursed relic...only for one of the Goodes' descendants to eventually chase down his great-great-great-granddaughter and slaughter her family, kicking up the cycle yet again. It continues into present day.
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel First & Only, when the Jantine Patricians raid the Ghosts, Gaunt sends Corbec off to raid them back. When discussing what to do, Corbec declares that they should kill as many Jantines as Ghosts who died — at least. (On the other hand, both raids had been part of a cover for deeper games, and part of the raid was to feed that cover, making it look like Revenge.)
- Also in that book, the reason that the Jantine/Tanith feud had started in the first place was that years before Gaunt took command of the Ghosts, he had executed the Jantine Colonel's father for desertion in the heat of battle, which had led to the death of Gaunt's father.
- In Greek Ninja, it turns out to be the reason of everything that happened.
- Discussed in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits regarding the acts of vengeance between the legitimate and illegitimate descendants of Esteban Trueba.
- In all of The Icelandic Sagas. Brennu-Njálssaga, for example, follows Njáll and his sons as everyone pisses everyone else off and a lot of people get killed for some pretty petty reasons.
- The In Death series: The book Vengeance in Death is all about this trope. Roarke murdered six men to avenge the death of Summerset's daughter. Then the wife of one of the six men raises her son to murder six people who helped Roarke hunt down the six men, as well as Summerset, Eve, and Roarke to make a novena. Just goes to show Revenge has a lot of nasty consequences!
- The war between The Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds in The Lost Fleet series has degenerated into a Forever War at least partly thanks to this trope, with greater and greater atrocities being committed in the vain hope of breaking the enemy's morale and just making them even more determined to fight to the last. Notably, the protagonist's decision to break this cycle by declining to Sink the Lifeboats or indiscriminately bombard planetary targets without regard for the safety of noncombatants goes a long way towards helping the Alliance win.
- Only Ashes Remain: Just about everyone tries telling Nita that revenge is a sucker's game and never accomplishes anything, but she refuses to listen. She's determined to kill the person who sold her to the black market, but her first attempt fails, so he tries to kill her to protect himself, so she keeps trying to kill him to protect herself, so he keeps trying to kill her...
- Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Metzengerstein", in which two noble families have a perpetual feud based on this (and on an ambiguous prophecy). Ends with the last scion of Metzengerstein killed by a horse inhabited by the spirit of the lord of the other house, who apparently died in a fire the Metzengerstein heir started. Naturally, these events also fulfill the prophecy.
- This trope is the heart and soul of the Revanche Cycle (the title referring both to revenge and to revanchist policies of reclaiming lost territory). The plot is one revenge wrapped inside another, from nation against nation down to the deeply personal; if any character doesn't have a good reason for payback, wait five minutes.
- Such a cycle between the settlers and the Eora is portrayed in The Secret River.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Baudelaires spend much of the series trying to bring down Count Olaf, who continuously tries to steal their fortune and is implied to have killed their parents. It is later strongly implied that the Baudelaires' parents had previously killed Count Olaf's parents.
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- In the backstory, after Rhaegar Targaryen absconded with Lyanna Stark, Lord Rickard Stark and his heir Brandon arrived at King's Landing and demanded Rhaegar "Come out and die", but Rhaegar's father Aerys II had them arrested and put to death after a farcical trial along with several other young nobles. The remaining Starks and Lyanna's betrothed Robert Baratheon declared war along with Jon Arryn, uncle of one of those Aerys killed, and this led to the deaths of Rhaegar (at Robert's hands), Aerys II, Rhaegar's children, and Rhaegar's wife Elia Martell (by the Lannisters, who had remained neutral until the Targaryens began losing). The surviving Targaryens as well as the Martells have vowed to get vengeance on Robert and his allies.
- Later, Oberyn Martell tries to avenge his sister by fighting her murderer, Ser Gregor Clegane (a.k.a. "The Mountain that Rides") and is killed despite giving the Mountain a poisoned wound. His older bastard daughters want vengeance. However, his Paramour Ellaria Sand tells them to break the cycle, as she fears them trying to avenge their father may get them killed and draw her daughters into the cycle of revenge, along with the fact that the people who murdered their relatives are all dead by now. Oberyn's brother Prince Doran Martell seems to support the idea of breaking the cycle, betrothing one of his sons, Trystane, to Cersei Lannister's daughter Myrcella, however he is planning revenge on the Lannisters, but is very subtle about it and wants it done in a way that doesn't make the Dornish suffer.
- Pretty much the relationship of Dorne and the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. When Aegon the Conqueror showed up, he demanded Dorne let themselves become one of his kingdoms, rejecting Dorne's suggestion of equal partnership. Dorne told Aegon to piss off. Aegon and his sisters tried taking Dorne by force. It didn't work, and Aegon's sister-wife Rhaenys was shot down and possibly killed by Dorne soldiers (no-one's ever certain, and if anyone in Dorne knows, they ain't telling). Aegon and Visenya started burning large swathes of Dorne in revenge, Dorne waged a guerilla war, Aegon and Visenya burned more Dorne. This went on until Princess Meria Martell died, and her son, Nymor, took over, sending Aegon a letter saying something which prompted him to give up on trying to take Dorne at all. But bad blood between the two countries remains, on-and-off until the present day, even after Dorne was peacefully integrated to the Seven Kingdoms, the Targaryens were deposed, and the Baratheon-Lannister dynasty ascended.
- The Dance of the Dragons included one of these. After Viserys I died, his queen Alicent Hightower crowned her son Aegon II as king, disinheriting the chosen heir Rhaenyra. Bad enough, but then another son, Aemond, killed off Rhaenyra's son Lucerys when he attempted to rally the cause for his mother. In response, Lucerys' stepfather, Daemon, sent assassins to kill Aegon II's heir, Jaehaerys, causing his mother, Helaena, to slip into depression. After she took King's Landing, Rhaenyra had Alicent's father, Otto, beheaded for his role in the conspiracy, and nearly did the same to Alicent until she begged for mercy. Then Helaena committed suicide, the smallfolk blamed Rhaenyra and forced her out of the city, whereupon she was ambushed by Aegon II, who fed her to his dragon. Upon his return to the capital, Aegon II repeatedly brushed off any advice at reconciliation with the other side and gesticulated at killing off Rhaenyra's son Aegon and Daemon's daughter Baela. This led to another conspiracy led by Corlys Velaryon (who was formerly Rhaenyra's highest adviser until she sacked him, and was also Baela's grandfather) which plotted to assassinate Aegon II. And even after these, the Dance still technically hadn't ended yet! Alicent, although imprisoned after Aegon II's assassination, attempted to goad her granddaughter, Jaehaera, to murder Rhaenyra's son Aegon (by now Aegon III, and married off to Jaehaera to unite the warring camps), but she refused. Alicent fell sick and died afterwards, taking her plans with it.
- The Star Trek novel Chain Of Attack, where multiple races have been wiped out in a war spanning millennia. The original perpetrators have long since been wiped out, with the current belligerents continuing the conflict because they believe the other party is the one who originally started the war — after all, even if you think you wiped the other guys out, there's always the chance that you missed a colony somewhere, and the old enemy might still be lurking. One race (the "winners" of the last series of battles) mistook the other (up-and-coming race) for their old enemy, and attacked without warning, continuing the conflict. It's believed that this chain of attacks has claimed many civilizations in the devastated sector of space the Enterprise finds itself.
- Star Wars Expanded Universe:
- The planet Melida/Daan in Jedi Apprentice has been split between the Melida and the Daan, who for many generations have been feuding over an original cause no one remembers — now each fights to punish the other for their most recent atrocity. All resources now go into fighting and memorials featuring recordings of the dead, urging the living to avenge them. The Young — the youngest generation — is sick of it.
- Nim Drovis (appearing in Planet of Twilight) has been in a civil war between the Drovians and Gopso'o for nobody-even-knows-how-long. According to legend, the civil war started from an argument about whether "truth" was singular or plural, but the combatants don't really care anymore.
- The Swampling King: The swamplings hate the highlanders for murdering them on sight, and the highlanders hate the swamplings for the exact same thing. Part of the problem is that the highlanders mistakenly believe that the swamplings control the deeplings, so everything the monsters do is blamed on the swamplings as well. That being said, the swamplings do genuinely kill any highlanders they find in the Swamp — but again, that's because the highlanders do the same to them.
- Taras Bulba. Cossacks vs. Poland and more personal Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- In Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191, the Confederacy wins the Civil War and then, with help from Britain and France, defeats the USA in another war twenty years later. This leads to a culture of "Remembrance" and revanchism in the USA, who plan for victory in another war and make an alliance with Germany for that purpose. This comes during the Great War, when the USA soundly defeats the Confederates, who then embark on an even more brutal program of revanchism and preparing for the next war under Jake Featherston's Freedom Party. If this all sounds familiar, it's because the series is largely based off of European history (see the Real Life section below) moved to North America.
- In Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Voyage of Maeldune", the hero is told to forbear his revenge becauseAnd his white hair sank to his heels, and his white beard fell to his feet,
And he spoke to me, 'O Maeldune, let be this purpose of thine!
Remember the words of the Lord when he told us, "Vengeance is mine!"
His fathers have slain thy fathers in war or in single strife.
Thy fathers have slain his fathers, each taken a life for a life,
Thy father had slain his father, how long shall the murder last?
Go back to the Isle of Finn and suffer the Past to be Past.' - In Nick Kyme's Warhammer 40,000 novel Salamander, in the Back Story, the 3rd Company had killed some renegades' captains; in the opening, they kill the 3rd Company's captain; shortly thereafter, the new captain goes in pursuit of them. They get sidetracked by another issue, but happen on the killers, and get both the commander and the actual killer. Whereupon their captain is murdered after the battle.
- This is what led to one of the most central rules of Warriors'... well, Warrior Code. When a cat was killed in battle, it dragged two of the Clans into constant war to avenge their fallen, until StarClan finally steps in to encourage the creation of a rule against killing unless in self-defense.
- This is a major theme of Wings of Fire, especially in the second and third arc. Its take on the cycle of revenge in war is that it's not the people that are your enemy, it's the corrupt leaders that force them to fight.
- In the second arc, the IceWings and NightWings hate each other because the IceWings think Foeslayer, a NightWing, kidnapped their prince, and their child, Darkstalker, killed that prince. Meanwhile, Darkstalker hated the IceWings because the prince, his father, was abusive toward him and his sister. When he is reawakened after two thousand years, he creates a plague to infect almost every living IceWing in hopes of getting them all killed. This drives the IceWings to attack the NightWings , who know the plague is an attack on them. This leads the NightWings to hate them more due to the attack. In the end, the fight is only stopped when a spell is cast to allow the dragons on both sides to understand the other tribes' feelings and see them as equals, rather than a faceless enemy to be fought.
- In the third arc, the history of Pantala has this theme as well. HiveWings tried conquering the LeafWings (who fought back and were almost completely wiped out, along with the trees they fought to protect) and the SilkWings (who surrendered and now live as a lower class society subservient to the HiveWings). The remaining LeafWings are pretty resentful, and revolutionary groups within them plan to burn down hives where the HiveWings and SilkWings live. Unfortunately, this would not only kill supporters of the war, but also thousands of innocent dragons who either refused to participate in the war, were literally mind-controlled into fighting it, or weren’t even alive at the time of the war, as well as several thousands of blameless SilkWings, especially their dragonets, who can't fly away from fires since they aren't born with wings. The protagonists try to prevent this, but it happens anyway.
- Wraith Knight: A Central Theme of the books is the attempts to get justice for past crimes and grievances results in this. It is particular in Regina's case as her insistence on avenging Whitehold results in her dragging the rest of the world into war.
