No revenge tale ends well.

For such a story to be written at all, a terrible injustice must incite it. It begins with horror and loss of some sort. The particulars will vary, but the inciting event is one that cannot be undone or made whole. The main character of such a story is one who has been thrust into a world that, to them, is practically indistinguishable from hell.

The character who ends up seeking revenge has suffered an indignity sufficient to motivate them to become obsessed with it. Their life has permanently been marred by the inciting event, the Terrible Thing that occurred. Their life, their thoughts, their emotions, is dominated by it. There is no forgetting or forgiveness. The injustice that occurred, for the protagonist, is one that never truly ended. At some level, it continues, endlessly.

At every step of the way, a story of revenge is also, to some extent and inescapably, a story of trauma.

And the one(s) responsible for the Terrible Thing? They must exist in a revenge story, be they real or perceived. Without them, there is no tale to tell – or rather, the tale is one of tragedy, but not one of revenge. A revenge story must have its villain, because the main character in a revenge story must have an architect of their sorrow, an adversary whose downfall they can pursue. Very often, that adversary, that pursuit, is the only thing keeping the main character alive at the outset and through most of the story. Absent the goal of revenge, the main character has nothing, or so they believe with every fiber of their being – whether they admit or even realize it.

There are only three possible endings to a revenge story. First, the main character fails to secure his revenge. Second, they obtain it. Third, they abandon the quest. But in a very real sense, which of the three endings we finally come to is not so very important – because there is always, always the aftermath to contend with, and it never sees the main character made whole.

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If the character tries and fails to bring down their adversary, then we have an unadulterated story of defeat and injustice. The bleakness in such a tale is unrelieved. It is nihilism in literary form. I make no judgment regarding the literary worth of such a story, but I would point out the fact that it robs both the character and the reader of catharsis. And catharsis has always been the point of most every story told. The ancient Greeks didn’t create it; they simply recognized the fact.

If the character sees the defeat of his or her adversary, then at least some account has been made of the awful event that set the story in motion – but it cannot ever undo that event. The scars remain, the loss is not offset by gain, but by yet more loss – the costs paid by the main character to obtain revenge at the very least. At every step, the main character is in danger of becoming the thing that he hates, in order to obtain revenge. And if the main character does triumph, then she will have ended her reason to exist. Finding a new one is rarely a simple task. And the possibility of one person’s retribution being another’s Terrible Thing is very real. Too often writers gloss over the aftermath, the grim string of cause and effect that, in the real world, has given rise to endless bloodshed, generation after generation of it.

The third possible ending in a revenge story is the abandonment of the quest. In it, the main character comes to the personal realization that revenge is not worth the cost. They choose to go no further down the dark path they have been travelling, not out of fear or cowardice, but out of realization. They somehow, through internal strength or external grace, fight their way free of the hellscape their existence has become and reach toward something brighter, something better. But even then, they will forever carry the scars of what has been done to them, and whatever they have done in response. Though they may heal, they can never return to being who they were. They can never regain what was lost to them. All they can do is accept it.

There are no happy endings, when it comes to tales of revenge. The only question a reader should have when embarking on such a journey is how badly will this end?