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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Stabbing From Hell's Heart

11/30/2020

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re venge (ri venj’) vt. to inflict harm in return for an injury
            -Webster’s New World Dictionary
 
A strange concept, really, when you stop to consider it… like many human characteristics and motivations: someone hurts us (in any number of appallingly creative possible ways, alas), and so we want to hurt them back, in some kind of perverse quid quo pro. Why, though? How is that possibly supposed to fix/heal/restore-balance-to-the-universe? The definition above is good at explaining the what, but doesn’t even attempt the why. Well, in the 2002 film of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (a marvellously clever adaptation I highly recommend, even though it takes a number of liberties with Dumas’ original story), the protagonist, Edmond, explains why he doesn’t want the people who destroyed his life simply murdered: “Death is too good for them. They must suffer as I suffered. They must see their world, all they hold dear, ripped from them as it was ripped from me” and I think that’s about the best, simplest rationalization for revenge you’re likely to get. In other words, if I’m going to suffer, you’re damned well going to suffer, too… at least as much as me, and preferably more, as punitive punishment for starting the whole thing in the first place. If I hurt and you caused it, I want you to hurt, too.
 
But in his famous 1625 essay on revenge, Francis Bacon came out against it, for several reasons: it’s illegal and immoral; it focuses on stuff done in the past; it carries grievous consequences against the avenger if caught; and perhaps most importantly, from both moral and literary perspectives… it just leads to more revenge i.e. it initiates a cycle of bloody acts, as the first wrong is avenged by a second, which leads to a third, and so on ad inifinitum. Whether he actually believed what he wrote… well, who can say? He was a contemporary of a certain writer named Will, who also had a few things to say about revenge in… oh… quite a lot of what he wrote. Because revenge is a great character and plot motivator. Just ask Hamlet… or Lear… or Iago… or Macbeth… or…
 
I’ve been musing on this topic because I’ve just finished a couple of stories, in two different mediums, which both focus on revenge as their primary motivator. And they’re both extremely well done. We’ll focus on the first one today.
 
The Last of Us 2 (TLOU2) is a PlayStation video game released earlier this year. As the ‘2’ should alert you, it’s a sequel to the 2014 original. The first TLOU takes place 20 years after a plague --- considerably nastier than the current one we’re dealing with --- has essentially collapsed modern society. Joel, a small-time 50-something smuggler, is tasked with ferrying 14-year-old Ellie across the decayed remains of the US… because, it emerges, Ellie is the only person immune to the infection’s gruesomely lethal effects. If she can be delivered to a group called the Fireflies, maybe a vaccine can be crafted from her. So Joel and Ellie --- who initially loathe each other --- unwillingly set off from the Boston Quarantine Zone on their epic trek. By the time they actually reach the Fireflies in what’s left of Utah, their relationship has grown to the point they’ve effectively bonded in a father/daughter relationship. The good news on arriving: yes, a vaccine can be harvested from Ellie. The bad news? The process will kill her. Joel must make a split-second decision, with vast, historic ramifications. Does he acquiesce and quietly leave Ellie to her fate, knowing we’re talking about salvation for the entire human race? Or does he play the protective father, throw humanity to the winds, and save Ellie’s life?
 
It’s probably no great surprise (especially to any parent) he does the latter, fighting his way through the Firefly installation and rescuing Ellie, killing a whole swatch of Fireflies in the process --- including the doctor who’s about to perform the vaccine removal process on an unconscious Ellie. The denouement is their successful escape to a survivors’ settlement in Wyoming.
 
TLOU2 takes place five years later, and guess what? Yep, turns out the doctor Joel killed had a daughter, Abby… and she’s been searching for Joel ever since. Doesn’t appear she’s read Bacon’s essay, because she’s obsessively determined to avenge dear old dad. Which she does: Joel dies a pretty horrific death at Abby’s hands --- with Ellie forced to witness. The people travelling with Abby want to kill Ellie, too, a pragmatic if not overly merciful move overruled by Abby and her on-again, off-again boyfriend. They came for Joel; mission accomplished, and it’s time to be on their way. End of story.
 
Except, of course, it’s not, just as Frankie Bacon predicted. Ellie sets out with her BFF to track Abby and avenge Joel’s murder… and yes, folks, weeee’rrrre off! Embarked on the Revenge Carousel, that never-ending round-and-round cycle of perpetual retaliatory attacks!
 
Now, the interesting thing occurring at the game’s finale is that, after all the slaughter and destruction, Abby and Ellie finally square off against each other. Like two superpowers engaged in Cold War games, they’ve spent most of the storyline engaged in proxy wars, killing subordinates left, right and centre, but now, there they are, Actually Fighting Each Other (gamers refer to this as a ‘boss fight’), quarter neither given nor expected. They’re both physically and emotionally exhausted, burned out to the core by their mutual hatred, ready to settle this once and for all.
 
But they don’t. Abby, near death from the ordeal of being captured and enslaved by another group, is weaker than Ellie --- who’s also had a pretty harrowing time tracking Abby down. After rescuing Abby solely so she can kill her, Ellie finds, to her stunned dismay… she can’t finish the job. Keep in mind that Ellie, like Melville’s Ahab, has had this single-minded obsession of revenge against Abby, her own Moby Dick, for months.
 
So… why can’t Ellie complete her self-set task of revenge?
 
Well, I’ve reached my self-imposed word quotient for today… so that’s a discussion for next time.
 
Same bat-time, same bat-channel.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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The Adventures of Nerdy Kid

11/2/2020

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Picture
Once upon a time… a very long time ago now… (much more than last Friday, with apologies to A.A. Milne) … a young Nerdy Kid loved to be read to, and lo, his parents encouraged and fostered this love, perhaps because, coming from hardscrabble working-class English families, especially during the lows of the Great Depression, they recognized the value of literacy. Or maybe they just liked to read. Or maybe it was just a way of keeping Nerdy Kid quiet.
 
Once he mastered the art of reading for himself, Nerdy Kid read all kinds of stuff… whatever he could get his grubby young hands on, really (he was the sort who’d read the sides of cereal boxes at the table if there was nothing else available… which there usually was, leastways at breakfast and lunch, because his parents didn’t seem to mind his reading at the table… although, many moons later, his wife would; but that’s a story for another day).
 
Anyway, I was digging through Nerdy Kid’s voluminous archives the other day --- but no need to worry about break and enter, or anything sinister like that, because, as you’ve surely guessed by now, Nerdy Kid was, of course, once upon a time (more decades ago than I’d like to admit, so don’t ask), Me. As is usually the case in such situations, I sought something else entirely, and quite serendipitously, came across the comics pictured at the top of this post. Classics Illustrated Junior --- which seems a little backwards, don’t you think? Junior Illustrated Classics seems much more logical, but you can see the title just as well as I can --- numbers 511 and 546. Of course, there weren’t really 546 of these literary gems… the listing inside reveals 75 titles, but I guess it’s more impressive to appear to have waaay more than that, so a little journalistic license seems to have occurred. And look at the price! The princely sum of 15 cents each! Well, it’s a princely sum if you’re ten years old and you get a weekly allowance of 25 cents each Saturday… although a quarter stretched a whole lot further back in the Dark Ages of my childhood. Yep, sure did. My paternal parental unit would bestow unto me my quarter after Saturday lunch, I believe, and I would thereupon hie myself ‘round the long, U-shaped suburban crescent on which we lived to the local drugstore, where 25 cents would get me a comic --- which were usually twelve cents, but the Classics Illustrated Junior ones were a whole three cents more, so it was a bit of a splurge to purchase one --- and some candy. Sweet Tarts, Love Hearts, maybe a little chocolate (even then, the Force/Lure of Chocolate was strong with Nerdy Kid). Then I would return home to read my new treasure whilst consuming my sugary confections. Life was so much simpler then. Even if it was mostly in black and white.
 
Now, here’s the thing: my comic collection bit the dust decades ago during a misplaced fit of adolescent smug superiority, when I decided comics were literary trash. And given how much collectors will sometimes pay for decades-old comics nowadays, I regret that smug superiority very much, I can tell you. (And several other things, too, but that’s also a tale for another day. Maybe.) So… I’m not really clear why these two comics were spared the axe. It wasn’t accidental, I can assure you: even back then, my young anal-retentive mind simply did not work that way. Nope, there must have been something else at work. So I sat down the other day, temporarily abandoning my search, and gave myself over to these two comics to reacquaint myself with them, to reach out over several decades and the mists of Time and attempt to reconnect with Nerdy Kid. Why did he like these two comics enough to keep them? What was the appeal? I’m quite sure he had several more titles in the series.
 
Well, that was easy, actually. To start with, you can call them fairy tales if you want, but they were Fantasy genre tales. I would have been intrigued by various elements:
-the clever, anthropomorphic cat in Puss in Boots, totally comfortable talking with humans… and no, this had nothing to do with Antonio Banderas and the glibness we were shown in Shrek. The comic follows the plot as told by the 17th century French author Charles Perrault, one of the fathers of the fairy tale as we know it --- and does it in a mere 28 pages of pictures and text, which is pretty impressive, when you stop to think about it. We’ve got castles, wicked wizards, a scheming feline, a beautiful princess… all the elements for rip-snortin’ good fantasy are there.
-the teeny, tiny elves (probably my first exposure to this literary species, so different from the ones who would later capture my imagination in Tolkien’s works), sneaking into the poverty-stricken shoemaker’s shop and expertly crafting shoes overnight, to the mystified consternation of the shoemaker and his wife the next morning. Something very… precise in the procedure. (Also in 28 pages --- and while I know you can’t plot a curve from only two points, I’m already sensing something of a pattern here.)
 
Even today, so many revolutions around the sun later, I still feel the pull they would have had on Nerdy Kid’s embryonic imagination, goading him on not only to read stuff like that, but maybe create his own, to write stuff like that.
 
Yep. That’s why Nerdy Kid saved those comics: to remind himself of Beginnings later on (much later on), so when he was No Longer Very Young, but a little… used up by life… frayed around the edges (rather like those comics) … he would Remember.
 
And Dream (still).
 
And Create.
 
And he did.
 
Does.
 
Will.
 
                

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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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