Vengeance Feels Empty

Roman Bellic: There you go, you got your revenge. How does it feel?
Niko Bellic: I don't know how it feels. I'm trying to take it all in.
Roman: This is the moment you've been waiting for for so long, Niko. What do you mean you "don't know" how you feel?
Niko: I mean I don't know... I feel empty, okay? I feel empty.

— Grand Theft Auto IV

A powerful plot element, pursuit of revenge may be a driving motivation for a character. It may even be central to the plot because The Villain Must Be Punished. Upon finally exacting his revenge, rather than the sense of satisfaction he may have expected, an avenger may get... nothing. Maybe it wasn't really worth it, or maybe he just doesn't know what to do with himself now and had nothing else to live for. If these characters were avenging the death of a friend or loved one, they may belatedly realize that the deceased would not have approved or that it will not bring back that person and instead of blind rage, they now have to deal with actual grieving, since rage may have helped them avoid it by putting the blame on their enemy. This is one of the bad results of ignoring Forgiveness.

Confucius said that "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." This is because people who choose the path of revenge have condemned a part of their spirit to be stuck in the past and eventually destroyed which ends up making them worse off than before when the object of their revenge is destroyed by their hands and they feel little to no satisfaction after doing so. And that's not even mentioning how in the process they may well ruin the rest of their lives through the consequences of everything they've done in the pursuit of vengeance.

Related to Wanting Is Better Than Having, Now What?, and Revenge Before Reason. Compare Victory Is Boring.

The other major downside to seeking vengeance is the Cycle of Revenge — somebody may come along bent on Avenging the Villain in turn. For another consequence, see He Who Fights Monsters in which seeking vengeance causes the character to become morally corrupted.

Naturally, this trope is the opposite of Revenge is Sweet, where revenge feels fulfilling rather than empty. Contrast Roaring Rampage of Revenge, which is when some usually enjoy their revenge. However, even those who are enjoying their revenge often feel empty when it's over. Some of them solve the quandary with a Murder-Suicide, which may cross over with Miles to Go Before I Sleep. Compare to Success as Revenge, where a character "avenges" themself on an antagonist by working to be happy and successful despite the antagonist rather than taking direct action against them. Can be closely related to Being Evil Sucks in which this trope is more along the lines of "Being Vengeful Sucks". No relation to An Empty Revenge.

As this can be a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Black Cat: Train is once hired by a boy to avenge his father on a mob boss. Train shoots the guy, and the kid realizes he doesn't feel any different afterward. Train actually used a tranquilizer paint round that made a mess on the surface but left the mob boss alive, having predicted that the kid would react this way.
• This is tragically presented in Blood-C: The Last Dark. Saya's main objective in the movie to find Fumito and kill him for all the hell he put her through in the TV series. She finally did it, only to learn that Fumito had done all of that for the sake of helping her survive, out of love. This made her confused and sad and at the end, she didn't return to Mana after she found out what had happened to her dad, and went into an aimless journey.
• Cannon Busters: Philly The Kid watched his parents get murdered by a Botican war party when he was young, subsequently taking a Deal with the Devil and gaining Purpose-Driven Immortality so he can take vengeance by hunting down and killing the prince of Botica to make the whole country feel his pain. When he finally gets the chance, he hesitates like crazy as it dawns on him that he's really about to kill some random, innocent kid for something he wasn't involved in and didn't even know happened. Ultimately, he tosses aside his weapon, admitting that killing the prince is completely pointless and probably wouldn't even make him feel any better.
• Dragon Ball Z: Piccolo Jr. was born solely to avenge the death of his father, the original King Piccolo, by killing Goku. After Goku's Heroic Sacrifice against Raditz, during which Piccolo dealt the killing blow, Piccolo reflects that he got no satisfaction from Goku's death due to the circumstances, and realizes that he has no idea what to do with his life now.
• The whole character arc of Mikagami Tokiya in Flame of Recca. He starts out as a cold, distant jerk dedicated for only one thing: vengeance for his dead big sister. It's not until he found his not-so Evil Counterpart, Kai, who is bent on vengeance against how he's always considered second-fiddle by Tokiya's master, that his vision on vengeance-driven life starts to shake and eventually be destroyed: Kai dedicated himself so much in his vengeance with Mikagami that even after he actually won against Tokiya (since Tokiya is a Glass Cannon), he felt so empty that the only path he saw is to be Driven to Suicide. However, he gave a stern warning for Tokiya to not follow his path, and to go with it, one more Awful Truth, putting Tokiya's shattered resolve in trial: The murderer of his sister is his master. It's not until the final arc that he confronted his master to find out that it's his grandpa, and he just took credit of the murder because he felt guilty of unable to protect said sister from being murdered protecting Tokiya and wanted to atone by having Tokiya kill him. As a result of 'melding' with the Hokage, infected with their optimism and discarding the majority of his cruel ways (even at cost of becoming a Distressed Dude several times), Tokiya took the lessons at heart and refused to take vengeance, and once the story is over, he's changed into a warmer man.
• In the first season of Gundam 00, Nena Trinity laments that she has to go on a mission, and to break the monotony of the trip, she decides to bombard a wedding party Louise Halevy is attending, killing her parents and extended family. In the second season, Louise, who joined the A-Laws, is given a Regnant Mobile Armor by Ribbons Allmark to confront Nena with. Due to Nena still utilizing her severely outdated Gundam Throne Drei, Louise uses her monstrously strong Mobile Armor to subject Nena to a painful Curb-Stomp Battle. Driving Nena into a Villainous Breakdown, Louise takes great pleasure in running her Regnant's giant claws into Nena's Gundam, brutally killing her by way of bisecting impalement. After the Throne Drei is destroyed, Louise at first appears to subvert this trope as she breaks into chipper laughter over Nena's death, seemingly experiencing an in-universe Catharsis Factor. Then she starts speaking to herself, asking her parents if they saw her avenge them and if they're proud of her. When she gets no response, the reality that her parents are still gone sinks in, and she has her own psychotic breakdown, devolving into a screaming wreck.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, Ermes defies this completely. She acknowledges the claim that revenge is never fulfilling, but speaks out against it, due to her sister Gloria getting murdered by undignified circumstances.
  Ermes: Listen to me, Jolyne. There's tons of people who'd say, "Getting revenge won't bring your sister back." As if they understand what I'm trying to do. And others who would tell me, "Forgiveness is important." I don't care! There's no way I'd force myself to forget that my own blood relative was thrown into a sewer, and just go on about my life! This... is all I've been preparing for! Revenge is waiting, so I can decide my own destiny and finally satisfy it!
• Kage no Eiyuu no Nichijou-tan: When Twight recognizes his friend Elicia as wanting to kill the man who arranged the death of her father, he tries to talk her out of it. Not because he has an issue against vengeance itself, but because he recognizes what she's doing as "destructive revenge", as Elicia will certainly be killed regardless of her success due to her target's rank and level of protection. Twight had previously explained that vengeance is only to get back something you've lost, to zero out that losses, but it gains you nothing unless you do something more to make your revenge worth it. Elicia refuses to be talked down and goes for the kill. She initially feels elated at her success, but then quickly feels the emptiness she was warned about and the guilt begins to eat at her, and even more so when it appears she's been tracked down for revenge and her friends killed as a result. However, Twight reveals that everything from the moment she killed her target was a ruse set up by him to make his point. The man Elicia wants to kill is still alive, none the wiser. The experience makes her realize what Tweight was absolutely right, and is able to let go of any further desire for revenge.
• For most of his life, Ren Hakuryuu of Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic was completely obsessed with becoming strong enough to kill his mother in order to avenge his father and brothers, who she had gotten away with murdering when he was a child. When he finally manages to kill her (or so he thinks), he goes into a Villainous BSoD, with his partner Judal noting that this trope must be the reason: Hakuryuu has let hatred and desire for revenge drive him for so long that he doesn't remember how to survive without it. After a while, Hakuryuu comes up with a solution: transfer his hatred to his cousin, Ren Kouen, and anyone else who tells him that his way of thinking is wrong, and set out to kill them too.
• Maria no Danzai: An interesting example where the perpetrator appears to feel already that vengeance is empty, but it's continuing anyway. Mari Nagare was once a happily married woman with a loving relationship with her son, Kiritaka Nagare. Unfortunately, her son died, and the investigation told her and her husband that they believed he was driven to suicide by abusive parents. But when Mari Nagare read her son's diary, she learned the truth that a group of bullies inhumanely tortured Kiritaka, and he died in a prank gone wrong. Mari Nagare snapped and dedicated her life to getting revenge on her son's bullies by killing them. She divorced her husband, changed her name to her maiden name, Maria Akeboshi, cut off contact with her friends, got plastic surgery, and two years later, she's a nurse at the bullies' school to kill them off secretly. However, whenever she kills a bully, she shows no joy in their death, even though the bullies show themselves to be 100% scumbags that are remorseless and their crimes and are ruining other lives other than her sons. It appears that any Slasher Smile or Psychotic Smirk Maria flashes at her son's bullies while they're at her mercy seems to be strictly performative, as she returns to a despondent demeanor every time she's delivered the coup de grace. Maria afterward will remind herself of how many heads she has left to collect as she cleans up and disposes of evidence with grim detachment. Despite likely being aware that revenge will lead her nowhere good, Maria resolves to continue. After all, this isn't being done for herself but for her son, who died at the hands of absolute demons.
• Moriarty the Patriot: Billy doesn't feel any better after apprehending McGinty and giving him to the law to face justice accordingly. Sherlock points out that the person he truly has to forgive in order to feel better is himself, for doubting his friendship with Garrett.
• Naruto:
  • The series explores this with Sasuke Uchiha. After his beloved big brother slaughtered the rest of their clan, the then eight-year-old Sasuke devoted himself to murdering Itachi in order to avenge them all. He is repeatedly warned by others that even if he successfully achieves revenge, it will ultimately prove hollow. In particular, his teacher Kakashi, who also previously trained Itachi, encourages him to find other reasons to live beyond the pursuit of vengeance. Sadly, when Itachi pays Konoha another visit, he restokes the flames by delivering another brutal defeat to his little brother, making him even more desperate to achieve his goals at any cost.
  • In fact, when Sasuke finally succeeds in killing Itachi after the Time Skip, he's left utterly empty. However, Tobi then reveals an Awful Truth: Itachi was ordered to slaughter his clan by corrupt members of Konoha's Council, in order to prevent the Uchiha from attempting a coup that would've led to a bloody civil war. Upon learning this, Sasuke snaps and declares vengeance upon a new target, and felt complete satisfaction upon killing Danzo. He only seems to get over this when Itachi is temporarily resurrected, giving them a chance to talk. Even then, Sasuke remains semi-antagonistic, scheming to use his powers to become the Shadow Dictator of the shinobi world, only stopping when Naruto beats sense back into him.
• Odd Taxi: Tanaka had his life ruined by an unwitting Odokawa when the latter inadvertently caused him to drop and break his phone when he'd gotten an incredibly rare drop from a lootbox. As the straw that broke the camel's back on top of his already crappy life, Tanaka flips out and tries to kill Odokawa twice during the show with a gun he found by accident. Prior to their final encounter, Tanaka realises he's already lost so much that actually getting vengeance wouldn't solve anything or make him feel any better. Instead all he wants is Odokawa to acknowledge him and apologize.
• Rebuild World: Akira gets driven as a Determinator to get revenge when one of his combined Berserk Button/Trauma Button issues stemming from his Dark and Troubled Past in the slums comes up. However, success only leaves him depressed. Akira has to let his feelings out to someone as The Confidant to feel better.
• Ringing Bell: A lamb named Chirin swears revenge against a wolf for killing his mother. Realizing that he is not strong enough, he persuades the wolf to teach him how to fight. Years later, when Chirin finally turns on and kills the wolf, he finds that vengeance didn't make him feel better, it made him feel worse. Not only are the sheep terrified of him for his savagery, he's killed the closest thing he had for a father.
• Directly invoked by Fuu in Samurai Champloo. Near the end of the series, it's revealed that she's been searching for "the samurai who smells of sunflowers" because he's her father, and she wants revenge on him for abandoning her and her mother (who later died) when Fuu was young. However, when she finally does find him in the Series Finale, he's on his deathbed from illness, and she laments how unfair the situation is because she'd get absolutely no satisfaction or closure from killing someone in this state. And even moreso when he tells Fuu that he always loved her and her mom and only left them to keep them safe from his enemies who were trying to have him killed.
• In So I'm a Spider, So What?, main character Kumoko is traumatized during a close encounter with the dragon Alaba, surviving only because she was too pathetic to bother killing. When she became powerful enough to defeat Alaba, she was going to take great pleasure in killing him, until Alaba drops all his defensive skills and calmly awaits her killing blow. Having sacrificed her own pride and worked so desperately to escape death, the main character can't accept somebody calmly accepting death, ruining her sense of victory.
• Played With in Tiger & Bunny. Finding his parents' murderer is Barnaby's driving motivation, and though he ends up holding back from actually killing Jake Martinez, he's satisfied and ready to move on with his life when Jake accidentally ends up killing himself. Played straight when he discovers that Jake wasn't the one who murdered his parents.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: After her engagement with Prince Julius falls through, Angelica admits to Leon and Olivia that she still hates Marie and feels the need to take revenge on them. Leon convinces her that it would a waste of time to at best end in Pyrrhic Victory, and that the best way to get even with Julius is to live happily without him.
• Used with a twist in Vinland Saga. After his vengeance was denied by having his target mortally wounded by someone else in front of him, Thorfinn feels empty and without a purpose in life, and wonders aloud whether it would have mattered to him if he had been the one to kill Askeladd.
• This plays a large role in the backstory of ViVid Strike!. Rinne is tormented for several months by a trio of bullies, after they beat her up so badly and smashed her phone as her Mom was trying to contact her: which as it turned out was because Rinnes' much-beloved Grandfather was dying and he wanted to see her one last time caused Rinne to eventually snap, the following day, she beats all three of them so bad that they have to be hospitalized. Rather than feel any sort of relief or closure, she is horrified by her actions to the point that she spends 3 years suffering from extreme self-loathing.
  • Though somewhat subverted as she later feels they had it coming after she learns they pulled A False Innocence Trick Wounded Gazelle Gambit by lying to their families about how she assaulted them unprovoked and that they were her friends. However it was the act of lying and deceiving their families that was the catalyst, rather than the previous bullying.
• Getter Robo plays with this multiple times. In the OG manga, Ryoma storms a martial arts tournament and assaults most of competitors and some of the martial arts committee as revenge for them shutting down his fathers dojo through Wounded Gazelle Gambit in an attempt to blacken his name as a violent martial artist. The catch though is, the weren't entirely in the wrong. While their methods were underhanded, Ryoma's father was indeed, a violent, brutal fighter who's methods aimed to severely injure, disfigure or even kill those he fought, believing mercy in battle to be a weakness. Ryoma's act of revenge only served to show how his fathers training instilled the same brutal, near murderous fighting style. To top it off, half the of reason was he believed that modern Martial Arts had become a soft form of performative dance rather than true fighting, so his motives were more villainous. To drive home the point, most of the victims of his assault were innocent, everyday people who likely didn't do anything to provoke the beating they received. it plays with also as after getting his revenge, it shows that while he's satisfied having avenge his father, what makes it hollow is learning just how soft martial arts has become and there is no one who can challenge him to a "real" fight. And finally, it happens in original 1st chapter of the manga, rather than later in the story, with the rest of the story actually moving beyond his "What Now?" Ending by giving him a means to utilize his Blood Knight tendencies for a better purpose.
  • His Son Takuma is a more played straight Vengeance Feels Empty. His whole arc involves avenging his mother who was murdered by the antagonist, MCDonald while she tries to protect him. It lasts the majority of his story in contrast to Ryoma, who had it over and done with early on. Whenever he encounters McDonald, he flies into a fit of rage. What makes it this trope, is that, there's an implication that MCDonald willingly let Takuma kill him quuck and swiftly with as a means of letting him experience this trope, something Takuma implies when he says "So this is where my revenge ends?". However it averts it two ways. First it avoids the "What Now?" Ending as Takuma despite his revenge quest, still was fighting to save the Earth, rather than just revenge alone, a trait which he carries on after. Second, MCDonald was technically a Hero Antagonist as his actions were to prevent the emergence of Getter Emperor, which he believes killing Takuma, who is the son of Ryoma, and has a natural affinity to controlling the Getter will prevent this possible bad future Emperor causes. In the anime of Arc, they subvert this more as MCDonald wanted to avenge Emperor Burai, who was retconned as unknowingly being tasked with stopping Getter due to being altered by an Andromeda ship remains, a ship belonging to MCDonald's anti-Getter Emperor army.
• Gunslinger Girl. After being defeated by Badass Normal assassin Pinocchio, cyborg girl Triela becomes obsessed with a rematch, and eventually kills him after a long and bloody fight. In the anime adaptation Il Teatrino she doesn't look very happy about her victory, leaving Pinocchio's necklace on his body and seeking out her handler Hilshire for comfort.
  Triela: (quietly) I won.
  Hilshire: Yeah...
  Triela: You should praise me. It's what you do when someone wins. (Hilshire hugs her instead)

Comic Books

• In Amulet, this is the ultimately the result of Max's quest of assisting the Elf King. It's not like killing all those people (be corrupt like the Cielans, or innocent like everyone else) would make Layra any less dead.
• In Animal Man, after Buddy Baker brutally avenges the murder of his wife and children, he feels it was all for nothing, and decides instead to travel back in time and attempt to warn his family in advance.
• Blacksad: Jezebel Karup sets up a years-long revenge scheme against her abusive father for leaving her mother to her death, even marrying him as part of the plan, then framing him as a child molester so the town will lynch him. However, in the process she ends up making her niece an orphan, nearly gets said niece killed as well, and at the end of the day none of it will ever bring her own mother back. As Blacksad confronts her over all the collateral damage she's caused, she seems to have a Heel Realization:
  I feel so... cold.
• The Boys starts with Wee Hughie being drafted into The Boys after witnessing his girlfriend Robin get killed by A-Train of the Seven. Near the end of the series, Butcher gives Hughie the opportunity to kill A-Train in retribution for killing Robin, but after all is said and done, Hughie finds that offing A-Train doesn't make him feel better.
• Though the main character frequently takes pleasure in brutal revenge, this trope pops up in the Marvel comic version of Conan the Barbarian when Conan's ally Zula slays his former master. After Conan asks him how it felt, Zula responds that it simply felt hollow. Interestingly, Red Sonja also mentions this trope during this conversation when she says she was unable to slay the man who ravished her after he had been badly tortured.
• Darth Maul: After he kills Eldra, Maul expects to feel something, but he only feels empty, and angrier than before. He concludes that he will have to spend the rest of his life killing Jedi in order to fill the hole.
• When Deadman finally sees the man who killed him dead at his phantasmal feet, he finds it brings him no satisfaction. He's so infuriated by this that he demands the god who brought him back to explain why he was cheated out of satisfaction.
• Atrocitus in the Green Lantern universe runs into this problem when Krona, the Guardian responsible for reprogramming the Manhunters to wipe out all life in Atrocitus's sector, is killed. He's still left with his rage when it's all said and done.
• Iron Fist: Danny Rand spent ten years in K'un-Lun dedicating himself to becoming a living weapon so he could find Howard Meachum, his father's killer and get revenge. When he finally gets to the man, he finds he's become a paranoid wreck thanks to knowing Danny was out there wanting revenge, and actually wants Danny to kill him. Danny realizes vengeance won't solve anything, and tries leaving, causing Howard to draw a gun on him, only to be killed by a sudden, unexpected ninja (long story). Afterwards, Danny has to struggle with the question of what to do with his life now.
• Lady Shiva is a strange subversion of this trope. Though she became Lady Shiva to avenge the death of her sister, instead of lamenting the emptiness this life has brought her, she revels in it and embraces the meaninglessness of her violent actions.
• The ending of The Night Gwen Stacy Died has the Green Goblin skewered by his own Goblin Glider. However, Spider-Man, who had sworn revenge against the Goblin and vowed to kill him... didn't feel glad about it.
  Spider-Man: He's dead. Somehow... I thought it would mean more.
• Red Robin's uneasy ally who goes by Promise is driven by her need for revenge against her brother's killer but she expects no catharsis from killing him she simply feels it is her duty to even though the thought of taking another's life displeases her.
• In the "Kitchen Irish" storyline of The Punisher MAX, Yorkie Mitchell meets with Frank, bringing with him the son of a fellow soldier murdered by an Irish terrorist now hiding in New York. In the end, the kid kills his father's murderer but states he doesn't feel any better about it.
  Andy Lorimer: I don't feel any different. Me dad's still dead and I don't feel the slightest bit different.
  • And, of course, Frank himself (Yorkie even responds to the above quote by asking Andy if he thinks Frank feels any different). The original murderers of his family are all long-dead, but that in no way stops him from killing ever more criminals without affecting his emotions.
• In The Sandman (1989):
  • After escaping from imprisonment, avenging himself on his captors, and regaining his kingdom and his tools, Morpheus goes to Central Park and mopes because he does not feel as satisfied as he thought he would. His older sister snaps him out of it.
  • Some time ago Desire swore to make Dream spill family blood as revenge for not letting them have Emperor Norton, but after Dream does give his own son a Mercy Kill Desire admits that they do not feel triumphant, but scared.
  • In Dream Hunters, Dream has this to say to a kitsune who wants to take revenge on the man who killed the monk she fell in love with (in an attempt to convince her that this trope applies to the current situation):
    Revenge is a road without endings.
• Played with in Sin City: Marv acknowledges that killing the "helpless old fart" who had a woman who was kind to him killed will bring him no satisfaction...but everything leading up to the killing? That'll be a gas.
• Mark Richards, the second Tattooed Man, was hit by this hard after joining Deathstroke's fake Titans group. Deathstroke promised to help Mark find Slipknot, the villain who killed his son, if Mark joined his team. Mark did so and on his first mission participated in the brutal execution of the completely innocent Ryan Choi (the fourth Atom). Several issues later, Deathstroke found Slipknot and Mark finally killed him. The act of vengeance did nothing to ease Mark's sense of loss, compounded by his murder of an innocent man to get Slipknot. He then returns home and finds out his neighborhood is living in a state of fear thanks to the gangs he left to watch over the place terrorizing the citizens. So Mark's quest for revenge gave him absolutely nothing and his life's now even more of a wreck than before.
• Ultimate X Men: Jean convinced the X-Men against taking vengeance against the men in Weapon X.

Fan Works

• A central theme of Child of the Storm; while a Roaring Rampage of Revenge feels good in the moment, at best, it leaves you empty. At worst, it leaves you stained - for one thing, as Sean Cassidy observes, it's addictive. Some people do need to be stopped, permanently, but doing it for revenge won't leave you any better off.
• Ace Attorney/My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic crossover video Turnabout Storm:
  • After a rather long time trying to break through their lies, Gilda Griffon breaks down, finally admitting that their spontaneous plan to try to take revenge on the defendant ended up with this.
  • Conversely, the revenge-driven prosecutor Trixie defies this, claiming the opposite after losing the case: that the temporary guilty verdict against Rainbow Dash made her feel on top of the world.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Dan Vs. crossover The Wheel and the Butterfly Saga, Dan The Patron Saint of Roaring Rampage of Revenge gets his vengeance on Pinkie for annoying him and ruining his car (in an attempt to do something nice for him), by burning her photo album in front of her. Pinkie's ensuing Heroic BSoD causes Dan to be hit by this for the first time after hundreds, if not thousands of revenge schemes.
• A Theory of Butterflies and Other Insects:
  • Frustrated by how she hasn't been accepted by most of Wartwood, Sasha agrees to help the toads collect their dues. However, her initial glee at 'getting back at them' swiftly fades, replaced by a a growing sense of guilt as she sees just how miserable everyone is.
  • After nearly a month imprisoned in Toad Tower, Marcy makes a desperate escape attempt that causes several casualties amongst her captors. As Captain Grime coldly informs her of the cost, Marcy finds that she doesn't feel satisfied at all, despite all they'd done to her. She just feels numb.
• In A Different Fight, After Darhk's attack causes Laurel's miscarriage, she furiously tells Oliver to kill him for it. After he does, they have this conversation:
  Laurel: I thought knowing he was dead would make me feel better...but it doesn't.
  Oliver: I learned a long time ago that revenge...doesn't help in the long run. The only thing that does help is time.
• In How the Light Gets In, Dean tortures and murders Damian Darhk to avenge Laurel. Not only does he not feel better, but the ease with which he does it has him conclude that Darhk "was a pathetic weasel who would have been dead months ago if the team that was supposed to be watching [Laurel's] back hadn't been so wishy washy."
• In She is Listening, after Oliver kills Damien Darhk for murdering Laurel, he realizes that now he has no revenge to plan, no one to kill, and simply has to live knowing she's gone. Its even lampshaded by his hallucination of her.
  Laurel: I won't say I told you so, but you aren't feeling any better now, are you? (beat) I'm still dead.
• Kazuichi Strangelove: In one of the loops, Nagito murders Hajime in order to kick off the mutual killing game. Kazuichi is so outraged by this that he decides against resetting the loop until after he's watched Nagito suffer the consequences of his actions. After watching him be executed, however, Kazuichi notes that all he feels is hollow.
• In The Fight we Chose, Tyuule, former Queen of the Warrior Bunnies whose kingdom was destroyed and its people enslaved spends a good portion of the story secretly plotting the downfall of the Saderean Empire responsible for herself and her people's suffering. One invasion of the US Armed Forces, one Morality Pet and a harrowing battle later, she watches the last remnants of the Empire including her personal tormentor, Emperor Zorzal being bombed to oblivion. Yet, she felt nothing; in fact she actually breaks down, bawling her eyes out at all the death and suffering laid out before her.
• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Vivienne Graham doesn't get any satisfaction out of using her new Titan body to kill Alan Jonah in revenge for everything he did to her and San. In Ghidorah's backstory before it completed its slide into evil, it reacted similarly when it exterminated the alien beings who tortured it, albeit mainly because their deaths didn't do anything to satiate the Terrible Ticking they'd implanted in Ghidorah's heads. The penultimate chapter however makes it clear that whilst killing a mad little worm like Jonah didn't bring Viv and San satisfaction, killing Ghidorah (who has caused them both so, so much pain over the story) will be a different matter.
• In the Gunslinger Girl fanfic Death in Scampia, Triela is assigned to kill a Camorra boss who ran the child trafficking ring that had her abducted for a Snuff Film. She tries to feel some sense of justice, outrage or retribution, but because her memories of the past have been erased and she's been conditioned to have no emotional attachment to the act of killing, Triela feels nothing at all when she shoots him.
• Cruciamentum Eternus: Lucius takes revenge on the Death Eaters after Draco is killed. Afterward, it doesn't seem to do him very much good; he starts Drowning His Sorrows and appears empty and unfocused.
• Maylu's Revenge has this as a running theme with Maylu. She sets out to delete Roll as vengeance for how she behaved while Brainwashed and Crazy. When she succeeds, Maylu finds that she only feels angrier about it. After learning that Roll's actions were driven by the politics of DenTech City, she sets her sights on destroying it next. When that doesn't satisfy her, either, she plans to kill everyone living in the city.
• Feralnette AU: After witnessing Lila finally getting called out on her crap by Alya, Marinette quietly confesses to Felix that it feels strangely unsatisfying:
  Marinette: It, uh... it doesn't feel as nice as I thought it would. I've thought about hitting Lila like, dozens of times. Like a punch to the mouth, or something. That's just a crying teenager. A lying teenager, one who's only sad for looks, probably, but just some stupid kid anyway. ...I guess, I lost focus, is all.
• Quantity of Quirks: In the unnamed seventh oneshot, Izuku delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Bakugo but admits afterward that he didn't feel any satisfaction from it.
• "Path of Storms": Katara gives into her anger and kills Yon Rha to avenge her mother, and while she initially doesn't regret it, she finds the act left her feeling unsatisfied and more alienated from her friends.
• Perfection Is Overrated: Natsuki and Nao reach this conclusion late in the fic. Natsuki, after learning that the Usurper-possessed Obsidian Lord has destroyed the First District, still believes that they deserved to die, but realizes that even if everyone related to her mother's death is dead, she won't come back and her triumph feels empty. Nao realizes that robbing perverts "was fun for a while, but (she) realized (she) was never getting anywhere." The two of them find a new purpose, however, in defeating the Obsidian Lord, the Usurper and the rest of the SUEs so that they can bring the conflict to an end.
• The Witch of the Everfree: After Sunset kills the Great White Wolf for her, Applejack realizes that it hasn't made her feel better at all, and isn't going to bring her parents back.
• The Uzumaki Tales: Return Of The Whirlpool: After successfully killing Itachi, Sasuke notes that they'd always thought they'd feel joy or relief upon victory. Instead, they just feel sad.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: A sidestory starring Agatha's Gengar who was originally her younger brother Tony has him reflect that defeating the Gengar from Drowning Woods who killed him when he was a human and turned him into a Gastly did not give him any lasting satisfaction afterwards. He uses this trope to dissuade a pack of wild Growlithe and Arcanine who are about to attack a human town as revenge for being driven out of their home forest, instead offering to take them to a place where they can live in peace.
• The King Nobody Wanted: Glarus Glyn Glesai, a disgraced Qartheen aristocrat and former Sorrowful Man, tells Drogo that he has enacted bloody vengeance on those who wronged him at least eight times, none of which made him feel any better.
• Rose Redemption AU:
  • During "Fight Night", Rose finally gets the chance to call out White Diamond for all the years of abuse and cruelty she'd suffered at her hands, even getting to remind White that "Diamonds don't cry" after driving her to tears. Afterwards, Rose admits that this didn't make her feel any better.
  • When Jasper is forced to share a room with Rose, she's far than happy about it. Recognizing her resentment, Rose purposefully baits her into a fight in order to teach her the same lesson, as well as offering some sense of closure.
• Rivals Series: Played With. While Yuuri succeeds in his initial goal of ending Viktor's winning streak, his revenge is technically incomplete until he finally confronts Viktor, explains who he is and why he hates Viktor so much, and rubs it into the man's face. Unfortunately for Yuuri, something always keeps getting in the way, and then he starts sleeping with Viktor, complicating the situation even more. By the time Yuuri finally gets around to telling Viktor part of the truth, he can no longer find any pleasure in it because he's fallen in love with his enemy. All it really does is just reopen old wounds.

Films - Animated

• This is indeed how Kenai reacted in Brother Bear after he killed the bear he blamed for Sitka's death. He only screams out loudly to the skies after doing the deed. When he learns the bear is really Koda's mother and that inadvertently leaves him orphaned, he is left with much guilt from it.
• Said nearly word for word by Dave in Penguins of Madagascar. However, his solution is more revenge.

Films - Live-Action

• 27 Dresses: Jane spends most of the movie silently fuming at her sister Tess for her capriciousness, Bridezilla attitude (which includes making Jane do all of the work for her wedding), and especially "stealing" George, Jane's boss and longtime secret love. When Tess and George's rehearsal dinner arrives, Jane gets her revenge by pairing her maid of honor speech with a series of nasty pictures that expose all of the lies her sister told to make herself sound appealing. Jane claims that she was doing what was necessary, but her friend Casey retorts that if that was truly the case, Jane would probably feel better. She then asks an Armor-Piercing Question: "Do you feel better?" The answer is a resounding "no."
• Alita: Battle Angel: Ido tells Alita that he hunted down and killed the man who killed his daughter, but it didn't make him feel better.
• Avengers: Endgame: Thor decapitates Thanos, but as the Time Skip shows, it didn't really make anything better for him. If anything, it might've made things worse for Thor, as he devolves into doing nothing but drinking beer and being a lazy slacker for five years over the realization that his revenge satisfied nothing and saved no one.
• Batman Forever references this trope when Batman tries to persuade Dick Grayson not to pursue his revenge against Two-Face. Also toyed with in that Riddler convinces Two-Face that just shooting Batman would just leave him with "cold, wet hands; post-homicidal depression". Much better to find out his secret identity, ruin everything he cares about, utterly destroy him mentally, then kill him.
• Boyz n the Hood: After avenging Ricky's death, it's clear from the look on Doughboy's face that the revenge did nothing to help his pain over Ricky dying.
• Cell 8 (Swedish crime thriller/Author Tract on capital punishment): One character is desperately waiting for the state to execute a prisoner on Death Row in vengeance for what the prisoner did, so that the character can finally move on. When that finally happens towards the end of the book, he's still not able to move on. and then the real killer reveals that the prisoner was innocent all along.
• The original Conan The Barbarian film ends this way. Conan's quest for vengeance began as a child and consumed his whole life, and when it's finally done he has nothing. After the villain who slaughtered his village and parents is dead, and the villain's cult dispersed, Conan sits wearily on the stone steps of the cult's temple in long, bitter contemplation. His companions are gone, his lover killed, his father's sword broken, and the enemy who had provided his motivation in life is no more. This truth is foreshadowed and lampshaded at various points throughout the film, and it's clear that the audience is intended to be just as unsure if it was all worth it as the protagonist is. That being said, the final shot of the film is of Conan as King of Aquilonia, looking stern and contemplative but also in control and thoughtful, thus implying that this series of events improved him and freed him to achieve much greater deeds in the long term.
• In Death Sentence, this is how Det. Jessica Wallis thinks Nick Hume's revenge spree will end. She's right.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Mark Russell spends the first half of the movie (and the preceding five years) holding an unhealthy Animal Nemesis hatred of Godzilla, because his son was a casualty of Godzilla's battle against the MUTOs in the previous movie. When Godzilla is seemingly killed by the Oxygen Destroyer after he twice saved Mark and the Monarch brass from certain death (acts which the movie's novelization note caused Mark to begrudgingly find himself rooting for Godzilla), it's obvious that Mark isn't taking much if any joy in getting what he asked for, especially since Godzilla being taken out of the picture enables Ghidorah to reign unopposed and begin eradicating humanity.
• Horns: Merrin’s father prayed every day for Ig to die when it's believed that he killed her. When Ig was believed to have committed suicide, he states that it didn't help one bit.
• Uttered by Hattori in Kill Bill in how it's easy to lose one's way for revenge. Granted The Bride has good reasons for it but not without certain consequences along the way. After getting her revenge she spends hours locked in a bathroom, crying pitifully. One can only guess what she would have done if she hadn't recovered her daughter in the course of the film.
• Mused on in this inner monologue from Mean Girls.
  Cady: Calling somebody else fat won't make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn't make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George's life definitely didn't make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.
• Menace II Society: Caine feels this way after getting revenge on the carjackers that murdered his cousin.
  Caine: I thought killing those fools would make me feel good. But it really didn't make me feel anything. I just knew that I could kill someone. And if I had to, I would do it again.
• In Now You See Me 2, Thaddeus speculates that the Fifth Horseman was hit with this after completing his 30 year revenge plot in the first movie.
• This is, rather explicitly, the entire point of Oldboy (2003), the second film in the Vengeance Trilogy. After destroying Dae-Su's life, Woo-Jin states he has nothing to live for now that he's had his revenge. He briefly feels joy over exacting his revenge, but moments later he returns to being an empty shell of a man, thinking back on his sister's suicide (which he witnessed and tried to stop)^note also, it was Dae-Su's fault she was Driven to Suicide in the first place, but it also bears mentioning that all of it really was an accident. So after successfully completing his massive, 15 year Batman Gambit, cue Woo-Jin blowing his brains out in the elevator.
• In The Revenant, after a long and harrowing quest to avenge his son, Hugh Glass finally catches and defeats Fitzgerald in a bloody fight. But as he is about to land the killing blow, Fitzgerald smugly brings up this trope, asking if Hugh Glass really came all this way just to kill him and saying he hopes Glass enjoys his revenge, "because nothing's going to bring that boy back." Though this doesn't stop Glass from pushing Fitzgerald into the river to be killed by the Ree chief, it does lampshade the Pyrrhic Victory the film ends on.
• Zig-Zagged in Sin City. Aware of his troublesome predicament, Cardinal Roark ask his tormentor, Marv, if killing him in a particularly long and gruesome manner will make him feel better. Marv replies by stating the act itself won't, but just seeing Roark wither in pain will.
  Roark: And now he's dead, and you're heare to... eliminate me. Will that give you satisfaction, my son? Killing a helpless, old fart?
  Marv: The killing no. Everything up until the killing... will be a gas.
• Spectre: After the climatic Final Battle, Ernst Stavro Blofeld implores Bond to kill him on the spot. Instead, Bond has him arrested. It's implied 007 spared Blofeld because he knew that stooping to his Arch-Enemy's level wouldn't give him the closure he sought.
• Spider-Man: Following the accidental death of the man he thought killed Ben, Peter is next seen clearly still broken up. Seeing the man dead did not bring him peace or make the guilt of his actions go away. He brings up this to his MCU counterpart in Spider-Man: No Way Home after that Peter had expressed a desire to kill the Green Goblin for murdering his Aunt May, stating that his death did nothing and it took years and the love of others to get through that darkness.
• In the final scene of The Sting Hooker finds that Gondorff was right when Hooker feels this way after beating Lonnegan, and remarks that it's not enough. He still cracks a joke: "but it's close!"
• Thor: Love and Thunder: Thor tells Gorr killing all gods will not give him what he really wants: his daughter back. Thor speaks from experience.
• All but stated to have happened in the 2010 remake of True Grit. To get her revenge on Tom Chaney, the man who killed her father Mattie has to go through a deeply traumatic adventure where she watches multiple people die, is bitten by a venomous snake and her arm must be amputated because it was initially treated incorrectly, her prized horse that she is very affectionate towards has to be ridden to death to get her proper care for the snake bite, and she never sees either LaBoeuf or Rooster again afterwards. In fact it's subtly implied that LaBoeuf may have died from a wound he suffered in the altercation with Pepper's gang. All this to take down a thoroughly ordinary and dimwitted criminal, who only did what he did because of a moment of drunken rage and her father happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the cost of revenge being so high, it's pretty obvious Mattie didn't get much if any satisfaction out of it, and the last scenes of the film show her as an embittered and lonely older woman.
• In Zero Dark Thirty, after spending a decade hunting Bin Laden and those responsible for 9/11, Maya Harris finds herself alone in the back of a military transport. When asked where she would like to go, she simply begins to cry.

Literature

• In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Joe Kavalier escaped Czechoslovakia prior to US entry into World War II and spent two years cultivating his rage over the Nazi occupation of Prague, resettlement of his family, death of his father and finally, death of his beloved brother by German U-Boat. Hell-bent on revenge, Joe joins the navy in hopes of killing German soldiers. By way of Antarctica, he finally achieves his goal of murdering a German. However, the man was an innocent scientist and Joe's successful revenge made him feel like "the worst man in the world."
• Anita de Monte Laughs Last: By the spring of 2000, the deceased Anita has spent several years doing her best to torment her husband (who pushed her out a window to her death) by appearing to him in the form of a bat. She's just about to push him down a flight of stairs but changes her mind at the last minute for two reasons: she is done with the cycle of the two making each other miserable in their life together and afterwards, and she knows they once loved each other.
• In Bloodhound, Beka speaks to the ghost of one of the people behind the counterfeit plot, who wanted to get back at the whole country because they ended his years of loyal military service for hitting one incompetent officer. He doesn't have any regret for the many victims, but he does say it feels rather hollow to look at it as a ghost.
• Zigzagged in The Count of Monte Cristo. The Count initially takes a grim satisfaction in getting revenge on the men who wronged him, but when things go too far he wonders My God, What Have I Done?. The Count's punishment of the final man and the main instigator of the plot against him is done as much to force the man to give back the money he embezzled from the Parisian hospitals as it is to get revenge. In the end, he lets the final man go with all the money he earned honestly.
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein—The Nine Eyes of Lucien: After Lucien kills the witch that was responsible for tearing his family apart and ruining his life he's asked point blank whether it feels empty. Lucien lies and says it feels wonderful, while internally he knows it feels like absolutely nothing.
• The protagonist of Jack Vance's The Demon Princes trains since childhood to avenge his parents deaths and his Doomed Home Town, but after finally taking revenge on all of the titular princes, he realizes he no longer has any purpose in life, and is devastated.
• During Dinoverse Janine's old bully has to ask a favor of her. Janine tells her she'll grant it, but Candayce can't say a word until permitted, and so Janine airs her grievances, reminding Candayce - who's been growing a conscience - of all the horrible petty things she's done to Janine. But it's not fun, it doesn't mean anything.
• In Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn novel Hereticus, after the death of the man who killed her father, Medea realizes that her desire for revenge was really displaced desire to have known her father. (She asks Eisenhorn to tell her about her father).
• Played with in The Elenium. Krager is partly responsible for the murder of Khalad's father Kurik (the actual murderer having been killed long ago), and Khalad has vowed to kill him. However, Krager is dying of liver failure as a result of long-term alcoholism and wouldn't even notice a sword being stuck into him. Vengeance would mean nothing. Khalad, being a practical sort, accepts this...but resolves to hunt Krager down and kill him anyway, because the slippery weasel has escaped too many times and It's the Only Way to Be Sure.
• In Fire & Blood, after his beloved older brother Aemon, the eldest son of King Jaehaerys I, was killed by Myrish pirates occupying Tarth during efforts to drive them off, Prince Baelon Targaryen laid waste to their ships from the back of the dragon Vhagar, then massacred any surviving pirates who managed to make it ashore. He was hailed as a hero for his actions upon his return to King's Landing, but in private, Baelon broke down weeping in his mother, Queen Alysanne's arms, calling the victory irrelevant because it didn't bring Aemon back.
  Prince Baelon Targaryen: I slew a thousand of them, but it will not bring him back.
• Frankenstein: The Creature sets out to destroy the life of his creator Victor Frankenstein after the latter destroys the female Creature he was building for him, fearing that their new race would replace humanity. When he murders Victor's wife, Victor starts to hunt the Creature to the literal ends of the Earth before dying from exposure in the Arctic. The Creature visits his Father after his death, but realizes that he has no more purpose in this world and chooses to commit suicide.
• Ghostweight, a short sci-fi story by Yoon Ha Lee. A woman carries out a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the mercenary fleet that destroyed her people by stealing one of their Lost Technology spacecraft. Eventually the mercenaries track her down, and make it clear they'll keep coming after her no matter what...because they want to hire her services.
• The Hardy Boys Casefiles spinoff, a series aimed at older teens than the main one, starts off with the death of Joe's girlfriend Iola Morton in the first book, "Dead on Target", and he promptly goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge over it, leading to this:
  • In the final confrontation, Joe has Iola's killer, a terrorist assassin, completely at his mercy, but can't bring himself to kill him in turn because then he'd be no better. He actually attempts to pull the man back up, only for the terrorist to try one more time to murder Joe, failing and falling to his death anyway as a result. This exchange ensues:
    "He lived by blood, and he died by it," Frank said. He helped his brother to his feet. "Well, Iola's murderer got what he deserved. How do you feel?"
    "It wasn't enough," Joe replied. He turned away.
  • In "Line of Fire", the boys' friend Denny discovers that his stepfather, Lucius, is very likely indirectly responsible (due to negligence) for Denny's father's death in a factory fire, and becomes determined to kill his stepdad in revenge. When the boys try to stop him, Denny notes how Joe "killed" the guy who killed his girlfriend, but they correct him with what really happened, and Joe directly invokes this. Ultimately, before Denny can go through with it, he realizes they're right when he sees Lucius, in a fit of rage, about to shoot an employee who was trying to frame him for the crime; Denny stops him, realizing that either of them killing someone would be the worst mistake of their lives.
    Joe: Let me tell you something. I hated that guy, but I don't feel any better because he's dead. It still didn't bring Iola back.
• Heralds of Valdemar: At the end of Take A Thief, the person responsible for Bazie's (Skif's thief-mentor) death is killed by Skif. When Alberich asks, Skif says he's not happy, because "there weren't no justice" — the man got a quick death, and can't be hauled into court to answer for everything else he was behind.
• In The Many Mysteries of the Finkel Family, Micah helps Caroline get revenge on The Bully Marissa for destroying Caroline's art project by putting fake blood in Marissa's pen, which ruins her art project. Micah thinks it's hilarious, but Caroline feels scared and guilty.
• In Persuasion, Captain Frederick Wentworth's heart is broken by Anne Elliot when her Parental Substitute persuades her to break their engagement on the grounds of his being a flighty naval officer with an uncertain future. He returns eight years later as the most eligible bachelor for miles around when chance has his brother-in-law rent out her cash-strapped family's house, while Anne is unhappy, unmarried, and without her youthful beauty. He makes numerous passive-aggressive remarks about firmness of character and flirts with the Musgrove sisters. But it soon begins to sour when he sees just how much her spirit has suffered since the engagement.
• Played With in The Reckoners Trilogy: David Charleston has dedicated his life to killing the supervillain Steelheart for the murder of his father; at the end of the first book he succeeds. When asked about this trope in the sequel, he averts it by saying that killing Steelheart felt incredibly satisfying. However, it did leave him to run into a different trope as he was left figuring out what to do with his life now.
• George Orwell's essay "Revenge Is Sour", published on 9 November 1945 in Tribune, discusses this trope in the context of World War II having just ended.
• SA Novel About The Balkans by Slavenka Drakulic. The protagonist has a recurring nightmare where she sees one of the men who raped her in a Bosnian prison camp. She stabs him, and as he dies she sees the look of incomprehension in his face and realizes her revenge is meaningless because he has no idea why she's killed him.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, this is the problem faced by Ahrek after the apparent death of Dayless the Conqueror. His family was still dead, he couldn't let go of his hatred, and he didn't even have the satisfaction of doing it himself, leaving him to obsess over the man he hated for decades on end as his hatred slowly ate him alive from the inside out.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Ellaria Sand argues this against Doran Martell's plans for a cautious war, and the Sand Snakes' urging of open rebellion.
  Ellaria Sand: I saw your father die. Here is his killer. Can I take a skull to bed with me, to give me comfort in the night? Will it make me laugh, write me songs, care for me when I am old and sick?
• At the end of Space Viking, Lucas Trask finally catches up to Andray Dunnan, who he had been pursuing ever since Dunnan murdered his bride on their wedding day.
  It hadn't made the least difference. It had been like shooting a snake, or one of the nasty scorpion-things that infested the old buildings in Rivington. Just no more Andray Dunnan.
• Variation: In S.E. Hilton's book Tex, at one point, the main character and his older brother, Mason, pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road. As it happens, he's actually an escaped convict, who begins forcing Tex (by holding his brother at gunpoint) to drive him to the state line; all the while, he talks about how he had some "business" to take care of earlier, but when it came time to do it, he suddenly realized he was too bored to follow through, so he just left.^note We soon get clarification that while he did shoot his target, he left before actually killing him, so he survived. However, it is soon revealed (after he gets gunned down by the cops) that this was actually Mark Jennings; as such, that meant he was talking about going after Bryon for having turned him in to the cops several years ago:
  "But I thought I had business. Waited for it for years, the big revenge trip, and when it came right down to it, it was nothing." He was talking to himself, not us, like we didn't count. Like we were dead already. "...him lying there looking up at me, and he says 'Get it over with,' and it was like all the air out of a balloon. All these years of planning, waiting to dig the look on his face, and then I just didn't feel like finishing it. Not that I gave a damn about the son of a bitch—I was just too plain bored. And to think I could have been planning something constructive all this time, like the quickest way out of the country..."
• By the end of The Vazula Chronicles, Merletta and Ileana both want revenge on the Record Master of the triple kingdoms, Merletta for running the kingdoms like a Police State and secretly executing anyone who defies him, and Ileana for failing her out of the program to become a record keeper. In A Kingdom Restored, the Record Master is indirectly responsible for a massacre of merpeople by dragons based on incorrect information the dragons had. When the dragons realize this, one of them pulls the Record Master out of the water, executes him by breathing fire, and then throws his charred corpse back in the ocean. Merletta and Ileana both find the sight more upsetting than satisfying.
• At the end of Wuthering Heights, after almost twenty years of seeking revenge on the Lonton and Earnshaw families, Heathcliff finds he can't bring himself to separate the newly-in-love Hareton Earnshaw and Cathy Linton, which would have been his ultimate revenge. Hareton reminds him too much of his own younger self (a case of Gone Horribly Right, since Heathcliff purposefully set out to mold the boy into a Generation Xerox of himself), as well as of his aunt, Heathcliff's Lost Lenore Cathy Earnshaw, whom he strikingly resembles. The latter problem also applies to the younger Cathy, who has her mother's eyes. Ultimately, Heathcliff realizes that all he truly wants is to be Together in Death with Cathy, which no revenge can bring him.

Live-Action TV

• The 100:
  • "Resurrection" has Clarke wanting payback on the Mountain Men for their attack on TonDC, but when she kills one of them, Lexa asks if that made her feel better. All she says is, "No."
  • Octavia spends most of Season 4 dealing with this, after getting no satisfaction from killing Pike.
• Phil Coulson from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. after he kills Grant Ward on the alien planet. Of course, it doesn't help that Ward returns to Earth as the Inhuman villain Hive.
• In Arrow, Helena finally got to see her father die in "Birds of Prey", just not by her hand, and is arrested. When Oliver visits her at the police station, she tells him that her father's death didn't give her any closure or satisfaction and admits he was right that Revenge Is Not Justice.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the murder of her girlfriend Tara sets Willow off on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against those responsible for her death. It's demonstrably obvious to all concerned that flaying Warren brings her no catharsis whatsoever ("Bored now."), and the rest of the Scooby Gang try to prevent her from killing Andrew and Jonathan as well because they know it won't help.
• One episode of Criminal Minds features a pair of women who had lost loved ones (daughter and nephew, respectively) to criminals who then got off with light sentences. The women team up to kill the people responsible, then continue when they find out the daughter's murderer actually had two uncharged accomplices. When all is said and done, four people are dead, one innocent victim is hospitalized, and the two women flee to Mexico. The first woman bemoans that it wasn't worth it because the revenge didn't give her the closure she was hoping for, while the other flatly states that for her, it wasn't about closure, it was revenge for the sake of revenge, but even she doesn't actually seem satisfied.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Even though Robert Baratheon killed the man who captured his beloved Lyanna in single combat, he seems to be unable to be satisfied with it—Lyanna died too and nothing can make up for that. He mentions that in his dreams "I kill him every night" but still finds no peace, which betrays the emptiness he feels even with having revenge.
  • In the penultimate episode, Sandor warns Arya that living your whole life seeking revenge on those who wronged you isn't worth it, and tells her not to throw away her life as he knowingly walks to his death to fight his brother Gregor amidst the collapsing Red Keep.
• Loki: Sylvie's life goal is to put a blade into whoever has been running the TVA and forcing her into a life on the run since she was a little girl. Yet when she does, she simply cries having had to betray the first and only person she ever loved to get it and the death itself not bringing a satisfactory conclusion.
• In Lost: Sawyer spent most of his adult life tracking down the con man who killed his father. When he finally finds him, he guns the man down in cold blood. Afterwards, though, he still feels empty.
• Malcolm in the Middle: One episode has Malcolm and Reese engage in an escalating prank war that culiminates in them playing chicken with go-carts. After bringing them home from the hospital, Hal tells Malcolm to cancel his plans for his birthday, as You Are Grounded!; when Malcolm blames Reese for this, Reese reveals he's been grounded on his birthday as well. Before they start quarreling over this, Lois asks if they remember ever having a birthday party before, causing both to realize they've always been grounded whenever their birthdays arrived. Lois tells them that this is all due to their petty squabbling and obsession with getting revenge on each other; as a result, neither has any happy memories of celebrating their birthday to look back on.
• In My Name Is Earl, during the Prison Arc, Earl attempted to help "John the Artist", a fellow inmate, reconcile with his parents. It didn't go so well, because John is a Spoiled Brat Manchild. Earl agreed to use the last of his lotto winnings to throw a prom for the prison, seeing as how John missed his high school prom (thanks to being too stoned to go), in exchange for John apologizing to his parents (for burning down their house with his meth lab) so that Earl could make the warden look good in front of the governor and get some time off his sentence. When John doesn't hold up his end of the bargain, Earl torches John's cell (and all his paintings and art supplies) in a fit of rage. He says he wasn't proud of what he'd done and was expecting some kind of retaliation. It turned out to be the kick in the pants John needed to see that he'd been a spoiled brat.
• Nicole Franzelli, the protagonist of No Good Nick, eventually comes to realize this: Her vengeful scheming against the Thompson family for putting her father's restaurant out of business didn't make her feel better or help bring back the normal life she'd hoped for. It only made her feel worse as she hurt people that she'd come to care about. At the end of Part 2, she sets aside her animosity towards them.
• The Outpost: Talon spent most of her life hunting down the people who wiped out her tribe and eventually succeeds, but as she admits to Garrett near the end of Season 2 when trying to warn him off of starting his own Roaring Rampage of Revenge, it didn't make her feel any better. Later, after taking his own vengeance, Garrett admits that she was right.
• It happens to Regina in Once Upon a Time, because after what she went through, she wants a revenge which continues whatever happens.
• In The Sandman (2022), after Dream got his vengeance on those who imprisoned him and recovered his powers, he tells Death that he now feels at a loss because that quest gave him a purpose. Thanks to his sister, he rediscovers his purpose with his appointed job and also rekindles his friendship with Hob.
• Jax spends nearly all of season 7 of Sons of Anarchy violently avenging the murder of his wife Tara. However, when he finds out that his own mother was the actual murderer, he is overwrought realizing how much unwarranted violence he has committed against gangs that up til then had been uneasy allies, how much potential revenge he has instigated, and how many of his own men have died for a lie. He is distraught knowing that club rules say he has to kill his mother because she caused club blood to be shed and his loyalty to his club conflicts with his loyalty to his biological family. Ultimately, he kills Gemma and then commits suicide by intentionally riding into oncoming traffic.
• In Stargirl (2020), Jordan Mahkent (AKA Icicle) has finally completed his Roaring Rampage of Revenge against everyone responsible for his wife's illness and death. He then admits to his employee Barbara (without revealing any details) that he feels no satisfaction over the completion of this "project". And even the imminent completion of his long-term Project New America doesn't feel as great as he'd hoped it would. He admits that it may have something to do with him being forced to skip spending time with his family to get this work done.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: For many years General Martok absolutely despised Kor for denying him a commission in the Klingon Defense Force, and longed to see the day when Kor would finally get what he deserved. He got to see that in "Once More Unto The Breach" when an increasingly senile and humiliated Kor had to be relieved of duty. By then, Martok takes no joy in seeing what is happening to Kor and after Worf tells Martok that he will speak to the Chancellor about finding something worthwhile for Kor to do, Martok says that he also will recommend to Gowron they find something for Kor to do.
• The story of Daedalus as told in The Storyteller has this message. After causing the deaths of his son and nephew, Daedalus tried to live a good life, but that was sabotaged by King Minos. Daedalus later takes a terrible revenge on Minos, but in doing so, realizes he's destroyed any chance of happiness/being a good person and is totally emotionally broken.
• Supernatural: Something that Dean Winchester has come to grips on. All a person feels is nothing but emptiness and points out how meaningless the quest for vengeance can be. In fact, the series brutally deconstructs just how dangerous the Roaring Rampage of Revenge trope could be.
• After Wynonna Earp kills the last of the seven revenants who killed her father and sister, she finds that she doesn't feel any better about it.
  Doc Holliday: In my experience, sometimes when you let the hate out, there's nothing left.

Radio

• In the Adventures in Odyssey episode "Waylaid in the Windy City, Part 2", Whit gives a speech to Richard Maxwell about the futility of revenge, focusing on how pursuing revenge will harm Richard. Keep in mind that this is while Richard has the man who ruined his life at gunpoint.
  Don't you understand that when you go out for revenge, you've got to dig two graves! One for the person you're after and one for yourself! Richard, there's no such thing as revenge, not really. It never replaces what you lost. It never restores. It doesn't even satisfy. You're out of the detention center now. You've got you're whole life ahead of you! Now please, give me the gun!

Video Games

• 9 Monkeys of Shaolin have you going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge on the marauders who killed your grandfather who raised you. You fight the perpetrator who is the second boss, but besides finding out said killer is a woman, you also realize she's fighting to restore her father's honor and is merely a slave to the Greater-Scope Villain.
  "She was only human. She committed all these murders because she was unable to accept her father's death. I feel better because I was able to discard my hate towards her, and feel sorry that she is dead."
• Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: At the end of one quest, the Eagle Bearer is offered a chance to kill the former Oracle of Delphi, who was coerced into giving a prophecy requiring the Bearer's sibling to be thrown off a cliff. They can refuse to take the opportunity for this reason.
• This leads to the ending "Mistakes Repeated" in Blank Dream. In one of the realms in the game, the Realm of Blood, Mishiro will enter a mirror to revisit a memory of when she lashed out at a bully and cut her hand. Instead of completing her objective in the mirror, however, you can choose to linger in this memory and hunt down and murder every single one of the bullies in revenge for their relentless bullying and what Mishiro lashing out meant for her home life. This trope and Ax-Crazy then lead to Mishiro being Driven to Madness.
• Baldurs Gate 3: Karlach, one of your party members, has a history with Gortash, one of the three main villains of the game. She worked under him as a bodyguard of his until he sold her to the Hells, where she was given a mechanical heart - one that begins overheating the moment she escapes the Hells, and will someday kill her if she doesn't return. Karlach swears revenge on Gortash for his betrayal, but when he's finally slain in battle, she will remark that him being dead changes nothing for her. He's no sorrier, he's just as mortal as the rest of them, and she will still have to die.
• In Borderlands 2 you can do a sidequest for Sir Hammerlock where he asks you to kill the thresher which tore off his arm. After you do it, he realises that he doesn't feel any better but still considers it a job well done.
  • Defied by Maya in the Son of Crawmerax DLC, where she declares that revenge is incredibly satisfying.
    "Someone once said, he who sets out on revenge should dig two graves. That's a stupid-ass quote, revenge is awesome."
• In Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Silas Greaves spent his entire life as a bounty hunter in pursuit of the bandit who killed his brothers and by the time of the game he's already killed far more than Roscoe "Bob" Bryant has ever had. The ending has him reveal that he knows full well that the bartender that's been listening to his story is Bob Bryant himself, and if he chooses to finish his vengeance he realizes that he's let violence consume his life.
• Cold Winter have your recurring ally and closest friend Kim (though she's The Not-Love Interest) killed by one of the major villains, Mahmoud. The next stage have you killing Mahmoud and all his men in a huge shootout, but in the cutscene afterwards you're anything but satisfied - you can only caress Kim's face and monologue about how you've seen so many deaths and is pretty numb about it before leaving her for the vultures.
• The end of Claire Russell's sidequest in Cyberpunk 2077, if she kills Peter Sampson. It turns out that she was lying about the circumstances of Dean's death (Peter Sampson did kill him, but it wasn't intentional) and used V all along just to be able to commit murder and get away with it. Afterwards, she doesn't feel any better, gives V her truck, and quits racing forever.
• Destiny 2: At the end of the “Forsaken” storyline, the Young Wolf finally kills Uldren Sov and avenges Cayde-6, but it’s clear that doing so didn’t make them feel any better; Cayde’s still dead, and all that their vengeance has really accomplished is wrecking relations with the Reef and deeply straining their friendship with Ghost. They don’t even get much congratulations for it; most allies they talk to afterwards are disturbed and saddened by their Roaring Rampage of Revenge, not proud. There’s no celebration or big reward. They just quietly go back to being Guardians, only now Cayde isn’t there anymore. And on top of all that, Uldren’s body is found by a Ghost and resurrected as a Guardian, rendering the victory almost totally moot - even worse, the memory-wiped Uldren now has to grapple with the fact he's treated like a heinous murderer at every turn when he is almost literally not the same person.
  Ikora: I knew Uldren's death wouldn't make me feel "better," but I thought it would make me feel...something...
  • The Season of the Lost actually has Ikora speak about this with Queen Mara, who's still pissed over how the Guardians killed his brother. Ikora, in trying to dissuade Mara from seeking her own vengeance, told her about how Uldren's death did nothing to help her pain over losing Cayde.
• Dusty Revenge ends with the titular rabbit finally avenging his father's death, only to realize it feels meaningless to him.
  But my revenge was met with emptiness. The emptiness of not knowing what lay ahead.
• The fugitive ex-slave Fenris experiences this in Dragon Age II. It's kill-or-be-killed (or worse, returned to slavery), but neither killing his master's apprentice nor his master brings him any satisfaction, despite the years of abuse they put him through. As an amnesiac whose few memories are still of slavery, he has no idea what do once he doesn't have to run and fight any longer.
• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, after Trip kills Well-Intentioned Extremist Pyramid, she obviously doesn't feel any satisfaction, and asks Monkey if she did the right thing.
• EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: Big Bad Zet's realization after being beaten up in his boss fight and freeing his mind. The decades that he has spent fostering his cult to lure in victims, performing on them the same experiments that humans performed on him, have been in waste. Especially after he sees the granddaughter of his brief lover before him.
• Implied in Far Cry 3 with the Boss Battle between Jason Brody and Hoyt Volker: the kingpin responsible for ordering you and your friends' capture. When you enter the Boss Battle with him near the end of the game, you are seen fighting him alone in a Knife Fight like the previous times in the game, when you finally leave the boss fight; there's an entire room filled with the bodies of Hoyts' mercenaries. Implying that Jason had already killed Hoyt before entering the boss battle sequence: Jason just couldn't comprehend that such an evil man that had caused him and his friends so much pain and anguish, had just died so easily. So his mind had orchestrated the entire boss fight to help him feel better about it by making Hoyt seem tougher than he really was showing just how far Jason's sanity had dropped.
• Fatal Fury 2: Invoked by Terry, at the conclusion of his rematch with Wulfgang Krauser, when he tells Tony that fighting for revenge leaves only emptiness.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the protagonist of the second generation Seliph feels this way after killing Emperor Arvis, who murdered the former's father. The secret event between Seliph and the ghosts of his parents has the latter lecturing the former about this trope.
  • Likewise, in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade: Lyn's entire motive for going out with the Tactician at the beginning of the game is to train and grow stronger so she can come back and kill all the Taliver Bandits for butchering her family and tribe. In her A-Support with Wallace, she's anything but pleased that he robbed her at her chance of revenge, until Wallace explains that he did it because he wanted Lyn to let go of her hatred and move on, and not disgrace her parents' names by letting her hate and thirst for vengeance consume her.
    Wallace: If you truly wished revenge upon them, you should be happy. Hatred can be strength. On the plains, you needed that strength to survive. But left too long, hatred can twist and consume you. [...] The blood of your parents flows in your veins. That you live must bring them no end of joy. But for you to be filled with such hate... Is this what your parents would have wished for?
    • Interestingly enough, this realization actually stops Matthew from taking his revenge on his girlfriend's killer, even though he's in the perfect position to do so (having successfully threatened his target's Morality Pet to the point where he won't even try to move out of the way). He remarks that he devoted everything to taking his revenge without thinking of whether said girlfriend would approve and tells his target to leave.
  • In Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, if you choose to let Shez kill Byleth, they end up feeling this way. Shez admits that they accomplished what they set out to do, but they also wonder if there was any other way to solve the situation, and they even tell Arval that they feel empty afterwards.
• Cait in Fallout 4 was physically and verbally abused by her parents, who sold her into slavery when she turned eighteen. Five years later, she managed to steal enough caps to buy her way to freedom, then came home and killed them. Rather than making anything better, it just left her with memories that she sought to forget via her drinking, drug use, and a life of violence.
• In Ghost of Tsushima, after confronting her sister Hana who orchestrated the deaths of her family and clan and caused them to commit seppuku, Masako reflects that she still cannot move on, as the revelation that her sister plotted against her and her family for years over a deep-seated hatred that Masako never knew about gives her no solace. All her attempts to properly mourn her family are now consumed with thoughts of Hana's bitterness and resentment and Masako truly has nothing left.
• In Ghost Trick, the events of the game are triggered by the Big Bad's quest for revenge after being wrongfully interrogated and interrogated for a crime he didn't commit, causing him to grow desperate, hold a young girl hostage, and through a chain of events, lose his fiancée to suicide. By the final chapters of the game, most of the protagonists are left for dead in a submarine sinking to the bottom of the ocean. While there, Detective Jowd dryly applauds him in succeeding in his quest for revenge, while he can only react with pensive silence.
• God of War: After spending most of the series in a state of Revenge Before Reason, Kratos has come to this realization as of God of War (PS4), centuries after he left Greece and settled in Midgard. He directly warns his enemies that revenge will not bring them peace. He even says this after to Baldur as he's about to attack his mother in retribution for the spell she casted over him. Sadly for Kratos, the message he's sending sails right over the heads of anyone who hears it.
  • Somberly reprised in God of War Ragnarök with Sindri. Following the second death of his brother Brok, this time at the hands of the All-Father, Odin, the dwarf becomes completely consumed with anger and a desire for revenge, to the point he angrily rebukes both Kratos and Atreus for their role in letting Odin, disguised as the god Tyr into his home, where he ended up fatally stabbing Brok when revealed. Come the climax of Ragnarok, as Asgard is being destroyed and Odin is defeated and his soul sucked into a Soul Jar, while Kratos, Freya, and Atreus decide to spare the All-Father's life, Sindri snatches and destroys it, killing Odin for good. As the epilogue shows, by doing this, all he's accomplished is removing his one and only distraction from the full weight of his grief and loneliness, resorting to completely isolating himself from everyone who cares for him and who he once cared for.
• The Trope Namer is Grand Theft Auto IV. In the game's final act, Niko finally tracks down the man who betrayed his squad a decade ago, only to find that he's a broken, pathetic mess. The man even admits that he sold his comrades out for drug money and has felt gulity for it ever since, and even begs for death. The game then gives the player the option to either kill him or leave him to suffer; choosing the former results in the Trope Namer conversation, whereas sparing him leaves Niko feeling like he can finally move on.
  • Strangely, the game averts this shortly afterwards, giving the player the choice of either taking revenge on Dimitri Rascalov or forgiving him for the sake of a deal. The former leaves Niko feeling better, while the latter leaves him angry with himself. Of course, the situations are quite different - while the traitor is a harmless, suicidal junkie who has long since paid for his crimes, Dimitri is a dangerous, backstabbing lunatic who has been trying to kill Niko for the whole game.
• This trope is central to the plot of The Last of Us Part II. Abby learns this at the beginning of the game; Ellie at the end.
• Legacy of Kain: In Soul Reaver, Raziel is executed by Kain in a seeming fit of petty jealousy, but is resurrected as a wraith by the Elder God, who puts him on the path to avenging his death. Come Defiance, he finally gets the revenge he wanted so badly, defeating Kain in combat and even ripping out his heart before banishing him into a dimensional rift. But at this point, he knows too much of Kain's true motivations, the actions of Moebius, and the Elder God using him, so he ends up feeling he just made things worse.
  Raziel: Kain was gone. The madness of this place had somehow fueled my rage, and as it subsided I felt no elation, no sense of victory. Only a calm certainty that we had once again walked blindly into our enemies' trap. I couldn't be sure whether Kain had truly intended to destroy me - and now it appeared I would never know.
• League of Legends has a funny subversion of this with Akshan, the Rogue Sentinel who absconds his Sentinel duties to hunt down and claim vengeance on the evildoers that killed his master. Normally, this would be presented as a cautionary tale, except he wields a legendary Sentinel weapon called "The Absolver" that has the power to bring murder victims back to life by killing their murderers, so in a way, his vengeance is weirdly justifiable.
  Akshan: Killing this person won't bring my friend back... Actually, it will! Let's go do that.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 2, it is possible to convince Garrus of this through Paragon dialogue during his loyalty mission.
  • Also in 2, Thane Krios gives a good explanation for why this trope is true: even if the target of your revenge deserves it, taking evil out of the world is not the same as doing good. While Thane did manage to hunt down the batarian slavers who ordered his wife's death, it left him estranged from his son Kolyat, who basically had to live with losing both his parents instead of just one. This led him to want to emulate his father, which is the last thing Thane would want.
    Thane: Kolyat, I've taken many bad things out of the galaxy. You're the only good thing I ever added to it.
  • In Mass Effect 3, Javik the last Prothean and the self-proclaimed avatar of vengeance can be pushed either towards this realization (in which case he despairs and plans to commit suicide after the war) or away from it (letting him start enjoying his life again).
• Present to an extent in the Max Payne series. At the end of the first game, Max has completed his Roaring Rampage of Revenge and seems to have achieved a measure of inner peace and satisfaction. By the time of the second game, however, he's wracked with shame and Survivor Guilt, wishing he'd been punished for the events of the first game, and by the third, has become bitterly resigned to the fate it brought him.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Miller falls into this after the death of Skull Face, having spent the entirety of the game in pursuit of revenge. While he's glad Skull Face is dead, it doesn't bring back the comrades or limbs he's lost, and becomes bitter at the realization that nothing will ever bring them back.
  • In a more meta example, Kojima confirms that this is why Skull Face is a Non-Action Big Bad and The Unfought who is unceremoniously killed off in a cutscene. By depriving the player of the opportunity to personally hurt and kill Skull Face, he wanted to point out that when accomplished, vengeance leaves an empty feeling.
• From the original NieR, after Yonah's captured there's a side quest 5 years later into the game that Nier has to destroy many robots for a desperate kid, Weiss puts it perfectly:
  Grimoire Weiss: Revenge is a fool's errand
  Nier: ...I know
• Played with in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, by inflicting it on the player. The entire game is about a pointless cycle of vengeance, with Travis seeking revenge against the man who killed his best (well, only) friend, when Travis himself killed that man's father and brothers. The last boss starts out as the Best Boss Ever, but his second form is just blatantly unfair, combining Teleport Spam with not knowing when to die and sometimes just throwing you to your death. After that, his final form is a giant Anticlimax Boss who, despite being the size of a parade balloon, turns out to be about as threatening. Knowing Suda51, this was intentional.
• Octopath Traveler has two instances of this.
  • The first is Erhardt. He blamed the king of Hornburg for the fall of his village through inaction, so he dedicated his life to regicide. He focused his entire lifestyle on getting to the point where he was the king's personal bodyguard, and when he finally does the deed, he realizes that he threw away a satisfying and fulfilling life for the sake of a vengeance that didn't even satisfy his anger.
  • The second is Primrose, the dancer. When she finally confronts the head of the group that killed her father, he asks "Is this what your father would want?" While it doesn't stay her hand, she realizes after the fact that she still feels the "hollow pain in [her] heart" that drove her to seek vengeance in the first place.
• In Octopath Traveler II, Osvald's journey is centered on getting revenge on the man who killed his wife and daughter. His old friend Lady Clarissa explicitly warns him about this in his third chapter, asking what he'll do after he finds Harvey and telling him that revenge is meaningless. Osvald refuses to answer her and keeps going on his journey. Fortunately, it turns out that his daughter, at least, is still alive, and Osvald is able to shift his main goal to saving Elena. This gives him something to live for afterwards, making the trope ultimately subverted. Ironically, it becomes clear in the final confrontation that Harvey was even more obsessed with besting Osvald and making him suffer than Osvald was with killing him; and unlike Osvald, his inability to let go of his jealousy and hatred cause him to be consumed by dark magic.
• The Oregon Trail (2021): If you successfully convince The Gunslinger to kill the man who killed his brother, he will complete his task but he then admits that he stills feels angry and feels that he cannot face his family ever again. Once he leaves, the son of the man that the Gunslinger shoots dead comes across the party saying that he will take his revenge for his father's sake.
• In Persona 5 Strikers, when defeated, Monarch Alice Hiiragi will admit that when she first used EMMA's Jail function, she exacted revenge on the school bully who made her life miserable at school and who had also leaked Alice's school record to destroy her upstart career by stealing the hearts of the bully's boyfriends and friends. But deep down, Alice still felt unhappy and unsatisfied, causing her to take her revenge on every woman in Shibuya to break up or split up any couples, partly because Alice was envious of their happiness and partly to show the bully who was the more popular one.
• The Devil of Caroc in Pillars of Eternity. She's hunting down one of the men who murdered her family during the purges, and can either kill him or spare him, depending on the Watcher's advice. Subverted. She finds peace only when her target is dead; it's sparing him that makes her feel empty.
• In Pit People, Pipistrella doesn't feel any satisfaction after getting revenge on the ones who caused her father's death. The Narrator Honey Kiss finds Pip's Thousand-Yard Stare depressing and tries lifting the corners of her mouth to "turn that frown upside down" (much to Horatio's displeasure).
• Red Dead Redemption II: Arthur Morgan is a firm believer of this. He considers it a game for imbeciles and constantly tells people that. He only takes revenge once, and that's on Colm O'Driscoll for torturing him and killing Kieran Duffy, and even then he quickly moves on and states that it doesn't make the gang's current problems any easier. At the end of the game, John, Sadie and Charles take vengeance on Micah Bell and are very clearly satisfied by it... but in doing so they end up exposing John's location to Edgar Ross, kicking off all the horrible events in the first game that culminate in the Marston family and what little remains of the gang both being all but wiped out, proving Arthur's point about revenge being a sucker's game.
  • Per above, Red Dead Redemption has Jack Marston avenge the deaths of Uncle and John Marston by Edgar Ross' posse, and his mother's subsequent premature Death by Despair, by finding and killing Edgar Ross and possibly Ross' family. Instead of being an author, Jack is now a murderer and outlaw. At the end, he simply looks at his empty pistol before walking away, wondering what to do with his life now.
  • There's also Sadie's arc in II. She's introduced being saved from the O'Driscoll gang, who killed her husband and implicitly raped her, and she spends most of the time she's not freaking out in a vengeful fury against the O'Driscolls, which leads to multiple complications for the Van der Lindes and several bystander casualties. At the end, after Colm has been executed and Sadie has killed the remnants of the gang, all she feels is grief and regret that the O'Driscolls turned her into a monster.
• In Starcraft II, Kerrigan is repeatedly warned by various people that her desire for vengeance is empty and won't make her feel any better. In an odd Double Subversion, she is instantly and noticeably happier immediately after killing Mengsk, but it's clearly for completely different reasons.
• Star Wars Legends
  • In Knights of the Old Republic, Carth obsessively focuses on destroying his former mentor, Saul Karath, after Karath defects to the Empire, glasses his home planet, and kills his wife. After Carth and the player kill Karath, Carth admits that it didn't bring him the peace he thought it would.
  • If the Exile in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords kills the Jedi Masters as revenge for what they did to them Kreia will ask what it has brought them. The general tone of the Exile's possible responses indicating that their actions have brought them no sense of peace or fulfillment.
• In the ending of Steel Assault, Taro Takahashi has just defeated General Magnus Pierce, the man responsible for the death of his parents. When Taro's superior points out that he finally got his vengeance, he remarks that he doesn't feel like he got much of anything. As it happens, Pierce still had followers at large trying to take over the United States, so Taro gladly continues the war with a battleship he had just nicked.
• From Street Fighter:
  • In Street Fighter Alpha 2, Sagat came to the realization that to seek vengeance is not honorable and would not revoke the act that Ryu inflicted on him (giving him the scar on his chest) when he met Dan Hibiki, who wanted his own vengeance for Sagat's transgression against his father. To this end, he lets Dan defeat him so he can find closure and live for something more than revenge, much the same that Sagat felt that he needed to end his grudge against Ryu.
  • Juri goes through the pains of this in Street Fighter 6. All she wanted out of life was revenge on M. Bison for murdering her parents and taking her eye... which finally happened in Street Fighter V with Bison's death. With that over with, she's found herself completely lost, only really motivated by the inertia of her bloodlust she developed in training to kill him, picking pointless fights as she stews in aimless misery. Juri compares herself to Chun-Li — someone who was also driven by revenge against Bison, but managed to find peace through avenging her father — and is pissed by the fact her enemy was able to move on while she finds herself trapped in dissatisfaction and an inability to find anything else to actually live for.
• Tales of Berseria: During a side quest where Laphicet helps a sick friend, Velvet gives him advice about moving on should he fail and not having his friend's death hang over him. After Laphicet walks off, Rokurou asks if that applies to Velvet's quest for revenge. Velvet gives out the frustrated response that she knows her quest is pointless but it's either that or giving in to the Despair Event Horizon.
• Downplayed in Tekken 7 where Kazuya has finally succeeded in killing his father Heihachi for all the misery he suffered at Heihachi's hands. As he drops Heihachi's corpse into the same volcano he was tossed into as a child, Kazuya doesn't smile or show a hint of satisfaction, only quoting the same words Heihachi said before the start of their final battle: "A fight is about who's left standing. Nothing else."
• By the end of Tomb Raider: Underworld and after a harrowing Enemy Mine moment, Lara Croft and Amanda Everet finally come to this conclusion concerning their hatred of each other.
  Lara: So it's back to this, is it?
  Amanda: What, You think we're even?
  Lara: Would killing me make us even?
  Amanda: ... (silently leaves)
• In Unicorn Overlord, Virginia seeks to kill General Giethe rather than wait for him to be summoned back to Gran Corrine given that he murdered the Knights of the Rose, except for herself, Miriam, Fran, and Kitra, with the four of them leading a suicidal charge on his fortress. However, it becomes apparent that he doesn't even remember doing this, and after Virginia kills him, she realizes it didn't make her feel better at all (especially given that she endangered her companions to do it) and chooses to leave the Liberation Army (but Alain and company convince her to stay).
• Maiev Shadowsong of Warcraft III's expansion pack The Frozen Throne and World of Warcraft; she pursued Illidan Stormrage for a long time, and realised this after she (along with a large set of adventurers) killed Illidan.
• Defied in Watch_Dogs. Aiden realizes that this is usually where people say they just feel empty, but he feels "awake" when he kills Lucky Quinn. Played with as while Aiden says this, he's also destroyed his life by forcing his family into hiding away from him as well as making himself a fugitive.
• This is what Leo feels about killing Vincent for his deception as an undercover cop in A Way Out. He doesn't gloat or tell him off, only watching him die in silence. While he tries to comfort himself with being there for his own wife and son, and moves them presumably out of state to start fresh, it is clear that killing Vincent did not bring him any satisfaction at all.

Visual Novels

• Subverted in Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth 2, Simon Keyes states that after revenge, everything becomes numb and you feel nothing. It's just that, for him, this is a drastic improvement over how he's felt for most of his life thanks to the four people he's since gotten his revenge on.
• This is brought up by Sasazuka in his route in Collar × Malice with two suspects.
  • Despite getting revenge on those who bullied and harassed him online, as well as on one of the game developers who encouraged said bullying, Sasazuka taunts Souda that even after getting their revenge, Souda still remains a pathetic Manchild with a toxic, lonely lifestyle who cannot live without gaming.
  • Sasazuka asks Akito if it was worth it after he carried out his substitute murder in exchange for getting revenge on those who caused his little sister's bullying and subsequent suicide. Akito honestly responded that he did not know and while he had some satisfaction in the moment, after Adonis wipes his memory after being captured by the police and leaving Akito with no memory of what happened, his revenge is technically rendered to be null.
• The Price of Flesh: Machete turns out to have joined Derek and his gang with the sole intention of killing them to avenge his sister, one of their previous victims. Should you successfully help him accomplish his revenge, he laments that he knew from the very beginning that he wouldn't feel any happier from it.

Web Animation

• Dingo Doodles: Sips kills Quinn-Ora, the witch who mutilated and cursed him, and Erina kills Bouclaire, the queen who executed her father for a petty reason. Neither actually feels better after doing so. Gothi points to these when convincing Xanu that massacring the Foreclaimers won't free him from the anger he feels, it'll just hurt him even more.
• RWBY: Since the sixth volume, Neopolitan has expressed her desire to get revenge for the death of Roman Torchwick at the hands of Ruby Rose. When she drives Ruby to suicide in the Ever After, a horrified Neo realizes it doesn't make her feel any better. She has no purpose, nothing to live for, and is so empty that she is easy prey for possession by the Curious Cat. When Ruby ultimately survives, Neo abandons her goal of revenge, having accepted that killing Ruby wouldn't make her feel any better.

Web Comics

• Inverted in 6 Gun Mage: The revenge lynching wasn't the empty part. In fact, it was quite satisfying. The problem was that it left the pursuer thirsty for that same high of hunting his prey for over twenty years and catching it, and the lack of satisfying targets has left him an empty wreck.

Web Videos

• Over the course of the Briarwood arc of Critical Role, Percy comes to terms with this, recognizing his own culpability in giving into his own hatred for the people who murdered his family while also rejecting the vengeful will of the shadow demon that preyed on him.
  Percy: Did I even want revenge before I met you?

Western Animation

• This is a recurring sentiment held by many characters (especially antagonists) in Greg Weisman's works; Flint Marko (the Sandman) in The Spectacular Spider-Man and Lex Luthor in Young Justice (2010) share Xanatos' philosophy on the matter. Those that pursue revenge on others are generally worse off for it in the long run, as all they end up doing is perpetuate a Cycle of Revenge.
• In the beginning of the sixth season of Adventure Time, Finn swears to take vengeance on his father for abandoning him and running off with a gang of escaped criminals, costing Finn an arm. Ultimately, Princess Bubblegum uses a simulator she's constructed to trick him into believing he's getting his revenge; seeing his fake father suffering doesn't bring Finn the joy he expected, causing him to realize this.
• Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender is typically the Team Mom and voice of reason, but when she gets a lead on the man that killed her mother, nothing stands in her way. She finally tracks him down only to find out he's a miserable old man, long LONG past his prime, essentially a pathetic, retired has-been who lives with his overbearing mother. She comes to the realization of this trope when her ice-daggers are inches from his throat.
• In the Fantastic Four: The Animated Series episode "Behold, A Distant Star", Susan and Johnny's long-lost father Franklin Storm was killed by a Skrull plot. They both want to avenge him by attacking the Skrulls (or to kill the Skrull responsible). By the end of the episode, after the Skrull Emperor gives the team a pardon for saving his daughter from a crossfire between Skrull groups, they asked for the one who killed Franklin. The Emperor sadly points to Morrat, his daughter's lover, who tried to overthrow the Emperor. The team leaves for home, feeling much worse.
• David Xanatos from Gargoyles acknowledges this trope by making his stance clear that "revenge is a sucker's game". He doesn't get bogged down by petty things like losing a fight, because even that tends to further at least one of his other goals in some way. The only time when he did (albeit reluctantly) try to take revenge on anyone, he got Out-Gambitted.
  • This is underscored heavily in "City of Stone", where Demona is willing to kill every human in New York City to Put Them All Out of My Misery.
    Demona: I will have vengeance for the betrayal of my clan. Vengeance for my pain.
    Wyrd Sisters: But who betrayed your clan? And who caused this pain?
    Demona: The Vikings destroyed my clan.
    Wyrd Sisters: Who betrayed the castle to the Vikings?^*Demona let the Vikings in because she thought they'd kill all the humans (who were somewhat ungrateful to their gargoyle protectors) but not the gargoyles. She was wrong; they smashed the gargoyles while the latter were helpless.
    Demona: The Hunter hunted us down.
    Wyrd Sisters: Who created the Hunter?^*Demona, by traumatizing Gillecomgain as a child.
    Demona: Canmore destroyed the last of us.
    Wyrd Sisters: Who betrayed Macbeth to Canmore?^*Demona, again.
    Goliath: Your thirst for vengeance has only created more sorrow. End this cycle, Demona. Give us the code.
    Demona: The access code is... "alone".
• Defied For Laughs in the Gravity Falls episode "Irrational Treasure". Dipper Pines and Mabel Pines find out Pacifica's familial prestige is a huge lie, giving them an opportunity to get back at her for making fun of Mabel. Mabel decides against it, but Dipper happily goes ahead anyway.
  Dipper: Man, revenge is underrated. That felt awesome!
• In the first episode of Primal (2019), caveman protagonist Spear's family are brutally killed and eaten by a group of theropod dinosaurs. Not long after, he encounters Fang, who is a similar species of dinosaur to those that killed his family and he's about to try exacting proxy revenge on her when the carnivores that really were responsible show up to attack Fang. Spear and Fang team up and kill all the theropods. Once they've won, though, Spear falls to the ground—he's avenged his family, but they're still dead and killing their killers is only a hollow victory.
• Rick and Morty:
  • Rick Sanchez spent decades searching the multiverse on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against his Evil Doppelgänger that killed his original family. When he revisits his home universe in the Season 6 premiere "Solaricks", he's disgusted by how twisted his neverending quest made him and states he needs to finally let go, and even after coming face-to-face with his long-lost Arch-Enemy, decides that protecting his new family is more important. However, in the season finale "Ricktional Mortpoon's Rickmas Mortcation", thanks to this encounter having given him a new lead in his quest, he's fallen right back into his old habits and is rather open over how miserable he is over it. Ultimately in the season 7 episode "Unmortricken", Rick manages to kill Rick Prime, but then finds himself without purpose, going through a Heroic BSoD as reality sets in which continues into the following episode. Lampshaded by Evil Morty knowingly asking Rick if he feels better, already aware of the answer.
    Evil Morty: How's it feel? Better? No? Exactly the same? (shrugs) Yeah, it always does.
  • This is contrasted in The Stinger with Slow Mobius' wife, who starts to go down the same path as Rick after Rick Prime killed her husband. However, she connects with another widow(er) and manages to make peace with what happened and start over with him as they both move on together, unlike Rick. However, in the season 7 finale it's shown that Rick managed to move on in his own way after Morty broke him out of his Heroic BSoD and turns down an opportunity to be reunited with her in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
  • Implied. After C-137 kills Prime Rick, Evil Morty knowingly asks if he feels "Better? No? Exactly the same?" before commenting that "It always does." Given both Evil Morty's hatred for Ricks and the sheer number of Ricks that he's killed, it's easy to guess that he is speaking from personal experience.
• Subverted in "Bartman Begins", a segment of a revenge-based anthology episode of The Simpsons. After Bart, in his guise as Bartman, has killed the man who murdered his parents, a reporter (Lisa) asks him if it was worth it.
  Bart: Well, I do feel a little better, and I got billions of dollars and no parents to tell me what to do!
• In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "A Few Badgeys More", Rutherford tries to apply logic to Badgey's desire for vengeance and death by telling him that it won't make him happy at all. Badgey comes to accept that, but his evil side refuses to accept that and splits off his logic side like he did with his good side.
• In Steven Universe Blue Diamond comments that she doesn't feel that there's any point to making the Crystal Gems suffer, since it doesn't give her any closure and just makes her miss Pink Diamond more. Yellow Diamond doesn't admit the same, but noticeably she finds no more satisfaction in making the Crystal Gems suffer than Blue and can only lament her own failings that led to Pink's apparent death even during the fight.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): Expressed in "Vengeance is Mine". Karai has turned against Shredder upon learning that Master Splinter is indeed her real father. After the turtles rescue her, she asks to know what really happened. Splinter tells the story of the long blood-feud between the Foot Clan and the Hamato Clan. Oruku Saki was the only survivor as he was an infant and raised alongside Hamato Yoshi (Splinter) as brothers. However, their rivalry turned bitter when Tang Shen entered the picture. She chose Yoshi and when Saki found his true lineage, he rebuilt the Foot Clan and his bitter duel with Yoshi led to Tang's death and Saki, now Shredder, adopting Miwa and naming her Karai (believing Yoshi to be dead.) When Karai expressed why Splinter never took vengeance, he notes the pain that it would cause. Unfortunately, Karai still attempts vengeance which Shredder anticipated, using her as bait to lure Splinter and the turtles, the plan being to mutate the turtles into monsters. Instead, Karai is mutated herself and becomes a feral snake mutant, leaving both parties utterly depressed. She does eventually regain her mind.
• Subverted and played for laughs in an episode of Tiny Toons. As he's about to get revenge on a one-shot character who wronged him, Buster turns to the camera and directly tells the audience that revenge isn't sweet... it's actually salty with a twist of lime. Everything can indicates that he enjoyed his revenge just fine.
• Transformers: Prime: In the episode "Hurt", Bulkhead is in critical condition after a fight with the Insecticon Hardshell. While everyone is worried about him, Miko and Wheeljack take action and decide to go after the Insecticon. He's killed by Miko with the cannons from Wheeljack's ship. While they were successful, Miko notes that she doesn't feel any better, and the rest of the Autobots give Wheeljack death glares when he brings her back to the base.

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