Revenge Fic

"Oh, that is it! Two can play at this extremely nerdy game! [...] "And that's why I like ALL them Star Tracks!"...said Strong Sad, an entire bag of Twizzlers falling out of his mouth."

— Strong Bad, Strong Bad Email #188 "fan club"

When the fanfiction writer has a chip on their shoulder for whatever reason, and inflicts misery on a character perceived to deserve it. Often occurs when the character's role is incidental and the writer really just has a problem with the distinct personality type, or if the character is in the way of the writer's pairing of choice. Though sometimes the character is a villain who really does deserve some form of punishment but is a Karma Houdini in canon. Another name for it is Anti Fic, although this term implies a degree of clever and biting satire. This type of fic is more commonly referred to as Bashing Fic.

In some circles (such as the Anime Fan Fiction Mailing List), the term "Revenge Fic" can also refer to a story where the characters step out of the fictional realm to inflict some kind of revenge on the fanfiction author for the things he or she made them do. This can be a variety of Meta Fic, and somewhat impinges on and overlaps with the concept of Animated Actors.

If this is done by the original author, it might be Derailing Love Interests or a form of Creator Backlash. If done by a different official author in the same franchise, see Armed with Canon. If this is done because the character is in the way of the writer's pairing of choice, it's a case of Die for Our Ship. Can be closely allied to Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!.

As a rule, the subject is almost always a Creator's Pest. The Scrappy tends to be the victim of these for obvious reasons. If it's for an entire series rather than a single character, it's a Hate Fic. Related to Take That, Scrappy!, Betrayal Fic, and Accusation Fic.

An in-universe version of this might end up as a Revenge via Storytelling example.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• There is a fic in which Xiaolang from Cardcaptor Sakura grew up to be a wife-beater, and Tomoyo called in a favor from her mother to have him killed in a hit-and-run. Also, at the height of Eriol/Tomoyo's popularity, it was not uncommon to find fics where Kaho, Eriol's official Love Interest was put through a Humiliation Conga that only started with Eriol dumping her for Tomoyo amid cheers from the rest of the cast. One particularly ridiculous fic said, as "justification" for all the torture, that Kaho was too tall for Eriol.
• In Death Note fandom, Near, Misa, L, and Light are the most common targets for this treatment (not that the other members of the cast are immune). One notable example is the Continuation Fic Apples Equals Cyanide Equals Light, which is a tasteful and very well-written story. It takes place after the end of the series, following Light as a shinigami taking his revenge against the ones who caused his death in canon.
• Fairy Tale:
  • A fanfiction called What Chapter 372 of Fairy Tail Should have been written in response to the aforementioned chapter, has Erza brutally torturing Kyouka in revenge for Kyouka torturing her, as well as threatening Erza's friend Mirajane, all in a vain attempt to find out where Jellal is. While Kyouka doesn't get off scot-free in canon, losing to Erza and getting killed by Minerva, one of her other victims, here, she suffers extreme torture that's over-the-top, even compared to what she did to Erza.
  • A similar fanfiction by the same author does the same thing with chapter 321, where Erza tortures Minerva in the Grand Magic Games by ripping her fingers off with her teeth and eating them!!!
• In The Grinning Snake, a one-shot crossover between My-HiME and Hell Girl written by someone upset over Shizuru not suffering any consequences for her actions, Konoka, the daughter of one of the people Shizuru killed in her attack on First District Headquarters, hears her father identify Shizuru as his killer with his dying breath. After uncovering evidence of Shizuru's guilt and failing to get Shizuru charged with murder or hear any true remorse from her, Konoka enters into a contract with Enma Ai to send Shizuru to Hell, making it also a literal revenge fic.
• Gundam:
  • In the Mobile Fighter G Gundam fandom, a certain revenge fic was once written to "counter" or "parody" the George x Chibodee yaoi fanfiction by showing how bad they'd get along if they had to move in together. The fans "loved" it, but technically... it didn't work as well as intended. The pairing bashing and how the fic came from a blatant hater of the couple gave it all away.
  • The Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans one-shot Ghost of Tekkadan briefly expands upon one of the loose threads set up by the "Ray of Hope" Ending, Ride Mass going on a vengeance crusade against the Gjallarhorn higher-ups, and shows him killing Rustal, Julietta, and Gaelio, who the author admits in the introduction to holding a grudge against for being canonical Karma Houdinis on account of successfully destroying Tekkadan.
• There are two Kimagure Orange Road fanfics that are infamous in the fandom for this. The first one is a yaoi lemon where Yuusaku rapes Kyousuke for dumping Hikaru and getting together with Madoka, and the other is Revenge Road, where Hikaru goes completely psychotic after the events of the Shin Kimagure movie, murders Madoka by shooting her in the head, and then tortures Kyosuke to death by slowly slitting his throat.
• Level Up (MHA): The story, via Izuku's Quirk, seems to be geared towards giving Izuku grief more than anything else. His Quirk is a jerkass who spends over a decade belittling him simply because he doesn't know how to use it's extremely complex Reality Warper powers. Said Quirk, Menu-chan, forcibly passes One For All to Itsuka when All Might tries to pass it to Izuku. Menu-chan boosts Izuku's girlfriends abilities far more than it ever does his own^*Itsuka becomes a Lightning Bruiser far surpassing All Might with a single perk. Momo gains the ability to create magical items. Shoko's ability with her fire and ice increases to the point she can create golems out of her elements. And Nejire gains an all around power boost along with a Hammerspace version of Victoria's Secret Compartment. Meanwhile, Izuku can create food with healing effects and random side effects but never gains a single combat ability. Menu-chan gives Izuku a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, with Izuku's own girlfriends siding with her even when she admits she bullied him simply because she didn't want to admit she didn't know how her powers worked either. Lastly, Menu-chan frequently uses any opportunity to insult Izuku, even using other people to do so^*Momo's wisdom stat is listed as low because she's willing to date Izuku, a kindhearted boy who literally saved her life when they first met.
• The second variety was both named and typified by the Revenge Wars which flooded the Anime Fan Fiction Mailing List in response to and in the wake of Scott "SKJAM!" Jamison's story Sauce.
• The Samurai Pizza Cats fanfiction Revenge of the Pizza Cats involves the Pizza Cats (as well as Lucille and Princess Vi, because why not) going to America to brutalize and then jail an FCC commissioner named Jeff Blundt (who somehow has control over what's being shown in Japan) because of a law requiring TV channels to air at least 3 hours of educational TV per day.

Comic Books

• A common accusation made against Fan Film The Death Of Batman was that it was created by someone that hated Batman for whatever reason, and wanted him to die an agonizing, humiliating death. It's just as likely the creator was simply willing to throw him under the bus to make a statement on how a Miscarriage of Justice can ruin someone's life (in this case the criminal torturing Batman).
• This is generally what ensues when Garth Ennis is handed the reins of a superhero title.
  • 303 doesn't feature any superheroes... but it ends with the main character assassinating an unnamed American president responsible for the Iraq War (and supposedly speaks English worse than the Russian main character).
• This fan comic is a huge one to Joe Quesada.
  • And at the source that inspired that, what Joe Quesada did to Peter and Mary Jane in One More Day looks like a revenge fic. Even the writer was in revolt.

Film - Live-Action

• Star Wars:
  • The many ways that Jar Jar Binks dies and/or is tortured horribly in many fanfics as a form of revenge for being, well, Jar Jar.
  • A fan-made alternate scene for A New Hope puts Jar Jar on Alderaan (along with Bail Organa).
  • These things routinely happen to Master Vrook in Knights of the Old Republic.

Literature

• Doctor Who Expanded Universe writer Lance Parkin once posted one of these to Outpost Gallifrey about a character everyone probably knew he hated anyway, seeing as he turned into a Designated Monkey whenever Parkin wrote him. Yeah, man, way to show that fictional character, spending your precious time writing two novels costarring him, nursing a grudge for two years, and writing a little story about him getting hurt in a nasty way. You sure showed him! Ha ha, not.
• Spitefic based on alternative character interpretations of Fifty Shades of Grey's Christian Grey is fairly popular. This ranges from playing up and then deconstructing his canonical abusive boyfriend traits to depicting him as a literal people-eating monster (which is kind of hilarious if you're familiar with 50 Shades' original inspiration).
  • A notable example: While Lucky Number Thirteen is part of this genre, it's written in a more subdued and realistic manner than usual. In fact, Christian never actually shows up in person and the "revenge" is more about getting Ana away from his harmful influence, although via Sharon, Christian's controlling, manipulative and sometimes abusive behavior gets thoroughly called-out. By the end Ana is completely disenchanted with Christian, wonders what she ever saw in him, and decides she's going to break up with him, with Sharon saying that combined they have enough evidence of his abusive and illegal behavior to make life unpleasant for him if won't leave Ana alone.
• Tread carefully with Harry Potter fics, for some shipping wars never die, but merely sleep in their house at R'Lyeh until the stars align. As the canon pairings became apparent, shippers for other couples (most famously, Harry/Hermione) started making massive numbers of Revenge Fics targeting anyone in the way of said preferred couples - the most popular targets being Ginny Weasley, and a certain inadvertently Trope-Naming sibling of hers.
  • Molly also gets it on occasion, frequently as the mastermind (or at least the potion dealer) behind her kids' "transgressions". In fact, with a fanfic community of that size, nobody is safe...
  • In This World and the Next is a Revenge Fic for all the Weasleys, as well as Dumbledore, Snape, the Dursleys and almost everyone else who's not Harry or Hermione.
  • Knowledge is Power is this for Dumbledore and the Weasleys, of course.
  • Though the story changes few of their actual actions, in The Real Us, Ron, Ginny, Molly, the twins, and Percy are subject to a scathing alternative character interpretation literally every time they're mentioned.
  • The author of Harry Potter And The Invincible Technomage makes it very clear he's not at all a fan of how the magical society as portrayed in the Harry Potter universe functions. While individual witches and wizards are fine and likable for the most part, the general society and culture itselfis frequently ripped apart for being ridiculously racist, ignorant, stagnant, and oftentimes arrogantly deluded in its own superiority.
• The War Against the Chtorr novel "A Rage for Revenge" has a lengthy section detailing the Humiliation Conga inflicted on a producer who ripped off his writer. Author David Gerrold thinks that anyone who pisses off a writer is just asking for trouble. "How many stories have you read that are basically about revenge?"
• Garrett P. Serviss' 1898 unauthorized sequel to H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, Edison's Conquest of Mars. In this novel Thomas Edison reverse engineers the Martian technology, combines it with a few inventions of his own to build a giant space fleet, and proceeds to fly to Mars with a huge army and beat the living crap out of the Martians with ludicrous ease. The entire book seems dedicated to inflicting as much pain on the Martians as possible, although the characters relent slightly near the end. Due to the lax copyright laws of the time, Serviss had no legal problems serializing or publishing the novel. Wells did not approve of the book. Edison did.
• Pretty much the entire point of the Whack a Sue LiveJournal community is to call characters a "Mary Sue" and kill them.

Live-Action TV

• Pick a crime show with UST. ''Any'' crime show. Now find someone who interferes with the aforementioned UST. There's fanfiction featuring them being tortured in some sadistic fashion if you look in the right places.
• Kate from Robin Hood has earned at least one of these.
• The late 80's/early 90's cast of Saturday Night Live put together a nice little number about mean old Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation has one with no title, it is satire and all the characters are wildly Out of Character (Picard goofing around, Riker hating Troi despite being her boyfriend, Troi herself whiny and unprofessional (going on about pain and agony etc), and La Forge also hating Troi. The story is targeted at Troi. She basically is rewritten into a wangsty useless character and then catches a disease from a child on a planet called Nosedirt. She is in life-threatening danger and survives but loses her abilities and is abandoned, And There Was Much Rejoicing.

Multiple Fandoms

• The Gunge Male Celeb fic Naughty or Nice is this for the four biggest UK soaps (Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale, and Hollyoaks). What happens is that Santa comes in for the 2013 Christmas season, and severely gives the selected male characters of their soap Laser-Guided Karma punishments, where covering them in gunge is just part of the punishment for what they did that year.

Video Games

• Parodied in "Children of Balls 5: Tale of the Bash", a chapter in a Baldur's Gate parody, where the story inflicts horrible revenge on someone referred to as "[insert the name of a character you don't like]". The idea is to say that humorous Revenge Fics tend to be all the same and not present any valid criticisms of the character being attacked.
• Dante's Night at Freddy's really skirts the line between this and Affectionate Parody. The story's entire purpose it to depict Dante slaughtering the Freddy Fazbear animatronics, but is not so much a Take That! as it is Catharsis Factor, given how you couldn't really fight back against the animatronics in the original game.
• Parodied in the Kingdom Hearts fanfic The Horribly Bloody Death Of Kairi. The author imitated the Hate Dumb against Kairi so well that a lot of people (including This Very Wiki at first) didn't notice it's a Troll Fic.
• In Persona 4, the girls of the Investigation Team cause the boys to have a miserable time during their stay at the Amagi Inn. Several fics aim to "correct" this by punishing the girls, such as The Amagi Inn Revenge Scheme and The Hot Springs Revenge Plan.
• Only Flowers Fall is a Pokémon Sun and Moon oneshot that does this against the game's Tragic Villain. It changes the ending of the game so that Lillie doesn't decide to go to Kanto with Lusamine. Lillie wants nothing to do with her mother. Lusamine isn't forgiven for her previous behavior.
• Tekken has a fanfic called A Robot's Apology where Leo and Lili attack Alisa for her betrayal of Lars.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • The 2009 Halloween toon "Doomy Tales of the Macabre" is basically Strong Sad, who's mad that everyone else in Free Country USA didn't invite him to that year's Halloween party, and writes a story in which his friends and neighbors suffer various bizarre fates.
  • In the Strong Bad Email "fan club", Strong Bad is subjected to Strong Sad writing SBEmail fan fic in which Strong Sad's shameless self-insert "Twelve-Times-A-Day Man" takes over checking emails, and Strong Bad gives Homestar a massage. Strong Bad retaliates by writing an unflattering fan fiction ("because I have time to say both syllables") about Strong Sad and the Deleteheads in which Strong Sad is attacked by a "sub sandwich constrictor".
• RWBY:
  • There is a RWBY fanfic that plays this trope straight: Blake's Revenge. It basically features Blake violently stabbing Adam to death as payback for everything he did at the end of Volume 3. Funny enough, she does get around to stabbing him in the show proper.
  • And a fanfic called The Death of Jaques Schnee where, oh, go ahead. Take a guess.
  • How Salem should have dealt with Tyrian features Salem having Tyrian violently murdered by Roman Torchwick.

  • The Tale Of A Cat Most Curious (link): Written after the airing of Volume 9 as a "vent fic" by an author who despises what the main "heroes" of RWBY have become in the later volumes, considering RWBY/JNR's post-Volume 5 actions and characterisations to be downright despicable people whom have caused more damage than the show's villains did on their own, and who is irate that Neopolitan was easily forgiven of her crimes in what he perceives to be a hypocritical and unearned manner, while feeling that the Curious Cat was treated very harshly comparative to Neo for their very tragic circumstances and very low body-count. Whether in the Curious Cat's thoughts or in the dialogue, RWBY/J all get called out relentlessly for many of their canon actions which the author finds reprehensible, particularly in regards to the Fall of Atlas and their behaviour in the Ever After. Ultimately, none of RWBY/J leave the Ever After alive, and Neo meets a self-inflicted Uncertain Doom, while the Curious Cat wins a happy ending for theirself.
  • A Deconstruction is provided in Weiss Reacts, where Weiss reads one of these fics with her as the subject. It results in a Tear Jerker as Weiss, despite her usual frostiness and sarcasm, is hurt to the point of tears by the fic. Cardin hunts down the perpetrator and gives him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown for writing said fic, and Weiss gets hugged by everyone, including Ruby, who the fic said would betray her.

Web Original

• While fic torturing The Nostalgia Critic is likely the most popular genre in the TGWTG fanfic fandom, at least it's done with love and keeps him in character. Not the case for Beer Enema, which stars an evil second-person narrator mutilating a shell-like Critic whose only personality is being a Pretty Boy with no spine.
• In the SCP Foundation, there were a series of SCPs that the authors decided they really, really didn't like (and to be sure, the SCPs in question were genuinely very badly written). So they came up with heavily exaggerated stories detailing how the Foundation got rid of them, all involving the Foundation's staff going into Mary-Sue Hunter mode and destroying the SCPs in brutal, over-the-top ways, which became known as "decommissioning" SCPs. After this purge they decided not to ever do it again, lest writers create terrible SCPs purely in the hopes of getting them declassified awesomely. (Not to mention that some of the authors' Original Characters were starting to lean into He Who Fights Monsters.)

Western Animation

• The fridge: Alternate ending (Nicole's Anguish) is an alternate ending to The Amazing World of Gumball episode of the same name, in which Gumball rightfully attacks Nicole after she tried shooting him in the back. This fic is an over-the-top example, featuring all of the Wattersons casually swearing, Nicole losing everything (including losing her job, being disowned by her parents and written out of their wills, and divorced by Richard and kicked to the curb), and Gumball refusing to view Nicole as his mother. It also features an Original Character named Penelope, Nicole's hippie sister who is an Old Flame of Patrick Fitzgerald (they're such Amicable Exes that Patrick named his firstborn after her).
• Caillou, Dora the Explorer and other characters from shows for young audiences get this constantly from their Periphery Hatedom. Said hatedom makes up a lot of the Periphery Demographic of GoAnimate. The kids making the videos with this website hate them for either finding them annoying or even just because they're baby show characters. It doesn't help that the titular characters of many of these shows are basically The Scrappy, especially Caillou. You'd be hard-pressed to find any sort of fanon (whether on GoAnimate or otherwise) that isn't a Take That! toward him in some way.
• Dakari-King Mykan is infamous for only writing that kind of fanfiction in general. By June 2013 he has written over 150 fanfics, most of which center around him turning lovable characters of shows like Digimon and Teen Titans into jerkasses who hurt or kill their friends, because he is unhappy with the fact certain pairings got bombed (to the point that he claims the Teen Titans finale literally gave him PTSD).
  "I do not like FIM at all... in fact I hate it and wish it were never made... and it makes me angry with all its lies and falsehoods about friendship being magic and the true salvation. Not to mention all the horrid emotional pains it brings me. So I create [My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic] to bash at it."
  • There's also The End of Ends which is this towards the finale of Teen Titans and doing almost exactly what the above described, with the added bonus of blowing up entire worlds just because one pairing came through while his preferred paring sank.
  • He even has a term for this kind of fic, "punishment fic", and has a certain commonly occurring variant. When one character (typically Davis or Beast Boy) doesn't get together with the one Mykan wants to pair him with (Kari and Terra, respectively), the former (yes, the person who got rejected, not the one who rejected him or the one she chose instead) will undergo a Face–Heel Turn and/or die, and the latter will be blamed for it. The aforementioned The End of Ends is an example of this, as is Cyborg Davis (in which, curiously enough, Davis comes back to life and acts the same way toward Kari as Terra did to Beast Boy in "Things Change").
• Family Guy:
  • Attack Of The 100 Foot Meg Griffin where Meg grows 100 feet tall and takes revenge on Connie for trying to kill her and frame her family, as well as others who screwed her over in the past.
  • The decidedly darker Wipe the Slate Clean opens with Meg killing Peter, Chris, Lois and a robotic duplicate of Stewie with a shotgun, then preparing to leave with Brian and (reluctantly) the real Stewie to Mexico. Subverted in that revenge isn't really the main point of the fic. The real point is more like Throw the Dog a Bone (for both Meg and Brian).
• The main motive for Fusion Gundam is to deal with Marilyn Manson in Final Stand of Death, thanks what he did to their original bodies in Deathbowl 98.
• Invader Zim: Gaz in particular is the most frequent target, because of her abuse toward her brother and terrible attitude combined with the fact that she rarely receives any retribution. Zim'sMostLoyalServant and Dibsthe1 are two authors who have published many stories where she gets her just desserts.
• The King of the Hill: Peggy's Revenge fanfic by Joey Joe Joe Jr. Shabadu had Peggy, Lucky and John Redcorn going OOC to torture Hank because he's bad at sex.
• The Legend of Korra flash-fic You Killed Me is, by the author's admission, an unabashed one against Zaheer. (Whether or not villains have it coming is likely a separate discussion.)
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • Within the fandom, there's the "salt fic", a term which is used to collectively refer to any fic written in the wake of "Chameleon" dedicated to punishing characters that the writer feels wronged Marinette in some form, with common targets being Adrien, Alya, the other members of Ms. Bustier's class, Bustier herself, and Lila.
  • In Bridges Burned, the whole class turns their back on Marinette thanks to Lila's machinations, with Alya disavowing their friendship in front of everyone. Marinette responds by gradually revealing her connections with various famous figures, such as Lois Lane and J. J. Abrams. People that she knows all of her former friends idolized, whom she forces to watch as she arranges amazing opportunities for others — namely, friends who didn't betray her. One by one, they see others living out their dreams, and are forced to realize that Marinette might have helped them instead if they hadn't blindly believed Lila and turned upon her.
  • In The Karma of Lies, Adrien is portrayed as someone with an incredibly bad case of It's All About Me with a side order of Willful Blindness regarding the suffering of others, and the rest of Bustier's class is depicted as constantly taking Marinette for granted while also ditching her for Lila. The end result? Their lives get completely ruined, with the class having their immediate futures thrown into doubt and Adrien being left isolated, near-penniless, and Hated by All while the person who manipulated and robbed them in the first place skips town.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, since there are tons of characters, some characters will have inevitably have ticked off certain individuals, no matter how loved or hated they are.
  • The Lemony Narrator of Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure really hates Fluttershy. The author makes it pretty clear that the story is basically a troll fic that makes fun of other people who fall into bad cliches and writing mistakes (especially people who make Original Characters). He also states that he doesn't seriously hate fluttershy.
  • In another in-universe example, it seems that the Lemony Narrator to Equestria: A History Revealed has a strong hatred for Celestia. Even through all of her blatant hate, despite her best attentions, what is presented clearly demonstrates that Celestia was more than competent in ruling the nation than the fic would have you believe. It gets to the point where it seems that some chapters and facts were rewritten to get some comeuppance against Celestia, even though it never works.
• Total Drama:
  • Courtney is an especially common target for revenge fics by virtue of being one of the original cast's most polarizing characters. The whole entire point of Courtney and the Violin of Despair is to subvert this convention by depicting Courtney as generally undeserving of the things happening to her.
  • Alejandro, a major Base-Breaking Character in the fandom and one of the series' biggest villains, is a common target - usually at the hands of one of the female contestants he manipulated and seduced. Total Drama Battlegrounds for instance turns him into a huge Butt-Monkey who at one point receives a Groin Attack from Bridgette (who is arguably his most infamous victim in World Tour), dubbed by readers as "the knee of justice" (although that's a mild case, considering some goes as far as getting him hospitalized after a brutal beatdown from the others).
  • While Duncan is certainly one of the most controversial characters in the show's history, many fics, usually those who ship Courtney and Gwen with other characters (or with each other) will endlessly trash on him. The most prominent example is Courtney's Crusade for Redemption, where his infidelity towards Courtney in Season 3 is treated as irredeemable. However, when he blows up Chris's house and is arrested, everyone loses all respect for him, he is permanently banned from the show by Chris, and is left to rot in jail for life, over something that in canon earned him zero scorn from anyone other than Chris.

---