Every good monster is formed, at its nucleus, by one of humanity’s common fears. This is where you get the classic monsters of myth, as adapted to our games, like faeries and goblins and bugbears and ghosts. It’s also where you get those new monsters that nonetheless work, our orcs and our liches. The converse is where you also get those that don’t work, that pad out useless pages of Monster Manual fodder, the gem dragons and the ropers and the modrons.1
That’s a pretty good encapsulation, and mostly works, but let’s expand a little bit. Every good monster, every monster that hits, arises from the wellspring of human negative emotion. Death, and the constellation of feelings that come from its brute fact, is among the most fundamental of these. We should not be surprised that these feelings are refined into monsters. The ghost is, at root, the person who can’t move on, can’t let go, the frenzied obsession with something or someone or what they think someone is. The zombie is the fear that the truest thing in the world—that death is final and that the dead stay dead—is not in fact true, and that that most inert of objects, the corpse, can nonetheless rise. The vampire, current iteration, is the thinly disguised fear of sex.
The revenant is the power of revenge. Interestingly, amongst undead at least, there’s two sides to it; it’s not just the fear of vengeance consummated.2 Nobody makes movies about sympathetic zombies, or if they do the sympathy is the pathos of the real protagonist’s point of view toward the erstwhile victims. No zombie protagonists.3
But revenants do get good press, sometimes.4 There’s two sides here, the fear and the hope.
I don’t think we see the fear as much as we ought to in our games. What is this fear? The fear is that there is no place in which you are safe from somebody else’s vengeance. The vengeance doesn’t have to be justified—there’s nothing requiring, outside of our syrupy male revenge romances, that the person seeking revenge be actually wronged. They only have to feel wronged. History is replete with people who suffered no objective offense but took offense anyway, people who suffered or sustained the widely acknowledged justified consequences of their actions who nonetheless seek a comeuppance. Or just two persons and an action which might be completely normal and acceptable to the doer but gravely offensive to the do-ee.
But that’s the fear: that you will never, ever get away with it. This is the fear that spawned the Erinyes, older than the Olympians, that there is a power out there greater than the power of death to quiet matters, that there is a power that will never forget and never forgive. Vengeance will be had, whether overnight or overdeath. There is no merciful forgetting. There is no statute of limitations. There is no getting over it. But there is something out there stalking in the dark or standing in the noonday sun that will settle accounts, in full. Some sins cannot be buried deep enough to be forgotten, because as soon as you have turned your attention to other business there it is blood-soaked and dirt-smeared and clawing its way back up.
It’s the perpetual bringing-up of old shit. The inability to rest goes both ways. It won’t let you rest, and your avenger, your nemesis, your revenant—and it is truly personal, truly your own—can’t rest. It doesn’t stop. It’s out there following you. And you know that. The instant you are aware of its existence you can’t forget it. You can busy yourself with other things, distract yourself, try to handle other pressing business, but there’s always that little nagging middle of the night eye-opener that it’s out there. In its own way it’s its own double codependent relationship: it won’t rest because it can’t, and you can’t rest because it won’t. What must be settled will be settled.
But there is hope, too. The revenant is the hope of the victim victimized. The world—as was, as is, as always will be—is one where the strong take what they will and the weak bear what they must. The revenant is the little black bird of hope for those who have borne what they must and more than they could bear.5 The revenant is the hope that even though all the mechanisms of the world may fail you, justice will be done.6
This is a strange pathetic pathos-etic sort of hope. Not that you will be rewarded for enduring your suffering, not that you will continue on past this to a better place later, but a cold iron-hard sort of hope that regardless of all that you have lost at least you will see those who made you suffer suffer as much as you. Let’s ignore all the warm bien pensant affect(at)ions that we’re supposed to have about reconciliation and restoration; when you look down inside, this just feels right. Just.
That’s the hope. And that there’s something more, even if that something more is nothing more than the settling of scores. This is what is behind the revenant. The fear that we can never be secure in escaping our sins, and the hope that others can never be secure in escaping their sins. And that’s enough to make a monster.
And the dragonborn . . . and the tieflings . . . .
It shares this with the vampire, which maintains an aura of romance around it. Much could be said about how the vampire, in contemporary or near-contemporary culture, is no longer about even a monster but primarily about romance. Thanks Anne, thanks Tom, thanks Mark.
C’mon, ackshually guy, I know you want to.
Let’s think, The Crow, Death Wish, The Punisher, Taken, the entire genre of man who loses everything—read, becomes effectively undead—and in return obtains a monomaniacal obsession with vengeance.
Correctly, not the revenant, but the possibility of being the revenant, of exaction, of making things right.
That’s actually an interesting point. What force defines when a victim is victim enough to return as a revenant? And which victims are not, and get short-shrift justice, and just lay in the ground forever?