Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. Take a deep breath, calmly collect your bitter thoughts and carefully plan out how to even those scores without resorting to random or impulsive acts of payback. But is that actually ever the case outside of fiction?
I remember reading Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo as a kid and basically hero-worshipping the protagonist Edmond Dantes, cheering him on as he unleashed his painstakingly well thought-out reign of vengeful terror against those who had him imprisoned for crimes he didn’t commit.
23 years later, I realize my perspective may have shifted a bit, as I realize the Count’s urge to destroy may have been slightly unhealthy. Of course I want to see the four conspirators destroyed, but the quest for justice comes at a moral price for Dantes. Plus, we are literally told that his time in prison made him insane, so I don’t think he should be considered a great role model.
And yet I’ve heard many accounts of people who seem to have taken a leaf out of Edmond Dantes’ crazy-book, only without the benefit of years and years of careful planning. Indeed, the main theme for today’s post seems to be “Hell hath no fury like a man scorned”.
So, in the spirit of Dumas’ classic, I have collected four stories, one for each of the novel's antagonist: Danglars, Villefort, Caderousse and Mondego, only in my version, the villains are serving the dish – hot with a side of extra petty.
I will rate each story based on various factors such as style, insanity and wow factors.
All Hut and Bothered
It wasn't because the guy invited her to Pizza Hut that my friend Dani chose not to come back for seconds. Nothing wrong with Pizza Hut for a first date, I’m sure it can be incredibly romantic to lock eyes over a deep pan cheesy crust, but Dani still decided to nope out of any future pepperonimance.
No problem, it was one casual date and they barely knew each other, right?
Wrong.
For this guy, the only sensible reaction to this rejection was to write an extremely formal email which he sent to Dani's friends, family and employer to enlighten them on her unreliable nature. What thrills me the most is the discrepancy between choosing a venue with Meat Feast on the menu and the ability to be so morally outraged over a polite rejection that you feel it a civic duty to eloquently warn everyone your date has ever met not to trust her. 3/5 slices for Pizza Hut Man.
The Virtue of Patience
Some years ago, Vilma was tutoring a young woman who quickly became overly invested in her fabulous mentor. Apparently lacking any grasp of personal boundaries, the mentee reached out to anyone in Vilma’s present or past who might dish out some useful info that – to her mind – would bring them closer together. Naturally, none of Vilma’s acquaintances would start gossiping just because some stranger hits them up on Messenger, right?
Wrong!
Vilma had broken up with a guy three years earlier, and he was just dying to unload everything about their relationship, including some very private and intimate details, to the first person who asked. When Vilma asked him to please stop sharing this intel, his response was “Nope, this is my revenge.”
The mentee and the ex are still Facebook friends to this day, forever bonded in their mutual obsession. Vilma hasn’t talked to either of them since the mentee sent her a text about lying in a graveyard crying because it felt like Vilma had died.
You can’t make shit like this up, and this story gets extra spice from the whole Lifetime movie plot featuring a young girl-on-girl stalker, but the act of revenge in itself was neither very creative NOR stylish, since he basically just waited a few years and then jumped on the opportunity when someone just as crazy happened to have more drive and initiative to be creepy. I do applaud him for managing to hold on to a grudge for that long, so it’s 3/5 for our gruesome twosome.
Points for Effort
Following a breakup, Cady jumped head over heels into a long-distance relationship with a highly attentive and charming man she’d had a holiday romance with in her tender youth. As anyone who’s ever fallen in love online knows, it’s scarily easy to project all your hopes, needs and desires onto someone who mainly exists as a profile picture and a lot of heart emojis. And it can be equally hard to accept later on that this person is in fact NOTHING like that perfect image you’ve spent so long constructing. Especially after he came to her town and they co-bought a house.
So it took a while from when the gaslighting and controlling behavior began to Cady starting to question certain things, like did he really need to drink that beer at 10AM, could he perhaps not blow up her phone when she was out at a work dinner and did she really need to send him photo evidence when she was at lunch with her parents and not having a clandestine tryst? That doesn't sound unreasonable, right?
WRONG.
When Cady pushed back, he doubled down by going out and sleeping with someone else in their town. That’ll teach her. What’s most impressive about this feat is that the town has around 1500 inhabitants and not many of them are single women. So the deed itself may be among the most banal in a narcissist’s repertoire, but the sheer DEDICATION to punishing your girlfriend for calling out your alcoholism and/or abuse is truly astonishing. Slow clap. 4/5 for the determined douche pony.
Epic Meltdown
Mona’s live-in boyfriend had a something of a temper, so when she decided to finally kick him out, she did so from a safe distance via phone. Not ideal, but probably better than spending hours being screamed at by an unemployed rockabilly with no place to be.
Make no mistake, there was plenty of screaming, but at least Mona had the option of putting the phone down once in a while until he ran out of steam. Another thing you need to know about this guy is that he was insanely cheap, so cheap that he more than once pretended to feel dizzy while waiting in line at the grocery store, leaving Mona to pay as he went outside and tried not to faint.
When Mona dumped him, she didn't order him to get out right away – he was looking after their dog that weekend, so it made sense to stay at her place until he found somewhere else – but apparently he was so furious he couldn't quit her apartment fast enough. Phew, what a relief, right?
Well. Wrong.
He took everything from her apartment that was his, including an extension cord that was plugged to the fridge. At the time, the dog was on a diet of raw tripe, so when Mona returned home days later, she was met by the stench of rotten cow belly dissolving in a puddle, dripping from the freezer.
The icing on the shit cake was the big fat slug lying on the floor in the middle of the room.
Look, I’m not saying the guy wasn’t entitled to his stuff, but I have a hard time believing this wasn’t an act of sheer pettiness, especially since he didn't let Mona see the dog ever again and thus would have needed the food. For someone so inconceivably cheap and unwilling to get a job, it actually speaks volumes that he would rather leave the meat for her to clean up than bring along and save some money he didn't have. That's a whole new level of petty.
We might still have given him the benefit of the doubt if not for the fact that he’d gone out into their very urban neighborhood and found a slug(?!) to put in her living room – which gets points for both originality and wow factor. 5/5 for the sluggish psycho – and a special place in hell for the dognapping.
Frailty, thy name is male ego
Let's circle back to The Count of Monte Cristo and the drawn-out and elegant comeuppance of the villains which is in stark contrast to the ridiculous behaviour I've just recounted. So wherein lies the difference?
If a warranted vindication needs to come from a place of legitimacy; a damned good reason for wanted to get back at someone, there needs to be a foundation of justice and honor in a satisfying revenge story, as opposed to tales like the above where the antagonists are motivated solely by wounded egos.
But if one is truly a just and honorable person, the vengeance must also be at a moral cost as the vigilante ultimately understands that their actions come at the price of their humanity. Fortunately for the four guys in this post, I don't think there was much honor to lose.
Can't be bothered with the whole book? Marvel has your back with a swashbuckling adventure and awesome capes!
"Sì! Vendetta, tremenda vendetta!"
The world of opera is filled with people who feel sufficiently wronged or insulted to take drastic measures, yet just about every character who ventures down this particular path ends up looking like a loser, just like our four clowns. So, with them in mind, Verdi's Rigoletto from 1851 seems appropriate.
The opera starts and ends with a curse cast upon a rakish and misogynist duke whose sole purpose in life is to sleep with as many women as possible. The curse is extended to the jester Rigoletto who eggs the duke on in his lecherous pursuits. While Rigoletto is pissing his checkered pants with worry over how this superstition might play out, the duke finds Rigolotto's carefully hidden daughter Gilda and sleeps with her too.
Dressed for the part: Rigoletto the fool with the daughter he loses as a result of his lust for revenge against the deprave duke
Long story short, Rigoletto vows revenge on his employer, who basically gets away with everything, while the jester ends up losing Gilda and blaming all his misfortune on the curse rather than his own decisions.
As if this wasn't bad enough, the duke also gets the best arias of the two men, and they're mainly about how any chick is as good as the next or what untrustworthy liars all women are – the two performances here are with Ho yoon Chung in a staging by Korea's National Opera that looks absolutely rad.
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