This video was sponsored by Campfire Blaze!
The ramifications of this will be felt for generations to come.
Revenge is a funny ol’ thing.
It’s such a simple character motivation - at its heart, it’s just anger in its purest
form.
Character A experiences something very bad and is thus filled with rage, and decides
to direct that rage out at Character B who they hold responsible.
It’s theoretically okay because Character B deserves to experience something bad, because
they did something bad to Character A. Character A’s garden variety anger at experiencing
something painful magically transforms into righteous fury once it’s being directed
at somebody who deserves it.
But the thing about anger is it doesn’t actually handle being directed very well.
Sure, theoretically Character A will be able to target all their righteous fury at the
villainous Character B, but sometimes in the process it turns
out that Character B actually isn’t responsible!
Well, then what’s Character A supposed to do?
The reasonable thing might be to let go of the anger and move on, but if Character A
has been letting that anger drive them, that’s not such an easy thing to do.
But Character A’s anger can no longer be righteously directed at Character B - it’s
not righteous fury if the target of that fury doesn’t actually deserve it.
If Character A unleashes their vengeance on the undeserving Character B, well, that’s not
vengeance anymore - that’s just hurting someone innocent, which is an unequivocally
bad thing to do.
Even more unfairly, sometimes Character B does deserve that vengeance, but Character
B isn’t available for some reason - like maybe Character B is already dead, for instance.
Or Character B is available, but unleashing
the vengeance on them will definitely hurt the unrelated
and entirely innocent Character C. What’s Character A supposed to do with all that anger
now that there’s nowhere righteous to put it?
Fundamentally, vengeance is an ultimately selfish act, an attempt to soothe an injured
soul by hurting the injurer right back.
Vengeance has a twist of justice to it, framing that crusade as a matter of fairness or balance,
bringing justice to an unjust universe.
But while we can equivocate on the meaning of justice or fairness or deserving, none
of that actually matters here, because vengeance is motivated by anger, and anger is an amoral
emotion.
It doesn’t actually matter to the anger if the person it’s taken out on deserves it.
Anger demands an outlet - it’s up to the person to choose a target for that outlet,
and if you wanna retain some semblance of morality, that means you have to find a target
who you could argue deserves to be hurt.
Vengeance frames itself as justice, but will be satisfied with the illusion of justice
- an eye for an eye, no matter who that eye is from.
If the actual wrongdoer isn’t available, the avenger will often shift their focus to
the next best thing.
This is how we get the sins of the father situation, where someone is held responsible
for actions they didn’t do, simply because they’re connected to the person who did it.
The archetypical “sins of the father” scenario is a child being held responsible
for their parent’s crimes, but it can be stretched to cover anyone being punished for
someone else’s actions - from family or loved ones being targeted for their personal
connection, to distant descendants being assigned some kind of bloodline curse, to any revenge
by proxy that depends on the suffering of someone who has personally not committed the
crime they’re being punished for.
Now, the term “sins of the father” broadly originates in The Tanakh, where it appears
in two specifically conflicting contexts.
In Exodus, the “sins of the father” concept is brought up by god, saying that he’s a
big fan of “punishing the children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth
generation of those who hate me”.
But then in Ezekiel, which was written some time later, god says the whole “sins of
the father” thing has been deprecated and is no longer part of his policy for the 1.1
alpha release, and now he judges everyone based on their own merits rather than holding
a generational grudge, saying “therefore I will judge you, o house of Israel, every
one according to his ways.”
So when it comes to the question “should the child be held responsible for the sins
of the father”, there’s technically biblical precedent for both answers, but “no”
is definitely the more justifiable one, since it came later and was written as a direct
response to the original “yes” angle - and it’s also the one that is broadly more fair.
Now beyond its origins, the “sins of the father” trope has obviously developed pretty
far and plays a role in most revenge stories, because, like we’ve discussed, revenge is
motivated by anger and anger is pretty notorious for causing collateral damage.
If Character B wrongs Character A and Character A embarks on a quest for vengeance, Character
B is not gonna be the only character who pays for it.
Even if Character A stays entirely focused on Character B, the people in Character B’s
life are gonna feel the effects - friends, loved ones, family, one way or another the
people who care about Character B will feel the impact of the revenge plot, even if the
only person Character A directly targets is Character B. Those characters are thus being
indirectly punished for sins they’re not responsible for.
But there are a lot of ways to handle revenge, and many of them are heavier on the collateral
damage than the more precision-targeted version.
For instance, sometimes the collateral is actually the point.
Character A might seek revenge on Character B by actively targeting their loved ones to
systematically strip away the things Character B cares about.
This is much more common with villainous revenge plots - and let’s actually explore that,
because revenge has a very interesting relationship
with morality and heroism.
I’ve mentioned that revenge is usually built on a white-hot core of amoral anger surrounded
by a thin candy coating of plausible morality - that it’s okay to make people suffer because
you’re in pain and angry as long as they’re bad people who deserve it.
Now while revenge is almost never seen as unconditionally
heroic, certain kinds of revenge plots are
seen as more heroic.
This usually corresponds with minimal collateral
damage and targeting the actual individual wrongdoer.
If the villain hurts the hero and the hero hurts them right back, that’s usually just
looped into the general space of “hero versus villain” - in fact, while heroes usually oppose
villains on an idealogical basis most of the time, adding that revenge motivation by making
the villain personally hurt the hero sometimes serves to make the hero seem more appealing
to the audience, to make their investment in the plot more personal.
Which is weird, because fundamentally, as we’ve discussed, revenge is not a moral act.
It’s not a heroic thing to do, it's a sublimation of anger and frustration
at an “acceptable” target - theoretically
the target is the person who caused that anger, but in practice that’s not really how it works.
There's a difference between taking revenge and the unconditionally
heroic act of stopping somebody who's hurt people from hurting more people.
Since the sublimation of the anger is the actual driving point of a revenge plot, it usually
doesn’t end up mattering who the target really is.
Heroes can have vengeance arcs, but vengeance is not a heroic motivation - it’s a selfish one.
And the “sins of the father” angle highlights that.
On paper and from a logical standpoint, if the person who hurt Character A is not available
for vengeance, Character A should stop seeking vengeance.
That’s the rational thing to do - since getting justice is no longer an option, they
should focus on healing instead.
This is the morally good, unequivocally heroic option.
But the vengeance motivation usually doesn’t just go away, especially if Character A has
been relying on it to keep them going and give them a purpose in life.
So Character A might choose a new target - in the process revealing the truth of their motivation.
Vengeance doesn’t demand justice, only personal satisfaction.
Character A is now actively seeking a target for their anger rather than pursuing justice
against the individual who personally harmed them.
This is not heroic, but that doesn’t mean heroes don’t have this kind of arc.
For instance, almost every dark vigilante superhero has some variant of this motivation,
where instead of taking out their anger on the specific person who hurt them, they choose
other targets who they think deserve to be punished or need to be stopped and take out
their anger on them en masse.
The motivation is still self-centered and self-destructive, but the outcome is Stopping
Bad Guys, so it theoretically works as a heroic motivation.
The audience is inclined to agree that Stopping Bad Guys is a good thing to do, so it works
as a candy-coating on the directionless rage central to their motivation.
But things get much more dubious if the avenging character isn’t just targeting people who
the audience agrees needs to be stopped or deserves to be punished.
That’s when the selfishness of the vengeance motivation becomes obvious - the character
isn’t pursuing justice for selfish reasons, they’re pursuing personal satisfaction for
selfish reasons, which is a selfishness double-whammy.
The sins of the father vengeance variant is where this starts getting really obvious.
Cuz see, Character B is the one who wronged Character A. But Character B isn’t available
to pay for their crimes.
Instead, we have Character C, whose only crime is being affiliated with Character B - and
no matter how bad Character B is, associating
with them is not equivalent to doing whatever it is
Character B did, and thus is automatically not deserving of Character A’s retribution.
Heroic characters are less likely to take revenge by proxy, but less morally stalwart
characters might take what they can get, leading to Character C suffering for a crime they
didn’t commit and had no part in.
It’s not unheard of for protagonists to seek vengeance by proxy, but it’s much more
common with villains - and it’s even more common for these villains to be targeting
heroes for their revenge-by-proxy,
since that's an easy way to drive large portions of the plot.
Now there’s a few specific sub-variants of the sins of the father trope.
The plain vanilla option is that the avenging character wants vengeance but the original
avenge-ee isn’t available, frequently cuz they’re already dead, so the avenger seeks
out the person closest to them to work out their frustrations on - often a direct descendant.
This can be something of a double-whammy for the descendant in question, since if their
parent slash ancestor is unavailable slash dead, they might already have some complexes
about that, which are only gonna be exacerbated by some supervillain popping out of the woodwork
to attack them for stuff their absentee ancestor did.
This is pretty common in cases where the avenging character just wants some kind of symbolic
payback and doesn’t really care who pays for it.
There’s also a fairly passive form of the sins of the father thing, where instead of
someone actively setting out to make a character suffer for the crimes of their predecessor,
they’re just held passively responsible for other pre-existing bad stuff - the “sins
of the father” might be used as a justification or a “karmic” explanation for why bad
things happen to that character, or are allowed to happen without any help.
Sure, if bad things happen to someone randomly,
that’s bad, and you might wanna help them, but if the character’s existence
is in some way cursed, that handily explains every bad thing they go through, and conveniently
absolves any bystanders from feeling obligated to help them out.
Sorry, buddy, will of the universe!
Shouldn’t have been born like that!
This variant is, on paper, more inoffensive than active vengeance, but it’s elevated
somewhat in the heinousness department by having the distinction of being a disturbingly
popular attitude in the real world.
By definition, nobody deserves the circumstances they’re born into - you can’t deserve
anything if you haven’t done anything yet - but it’s a very popular cop-out to ignore
or dismiss someone’s systemic suffering as a matter of karma or predestination or
the Will Of The Universe rather than shit luck, active malice and zero support.
For a super fun real-world example, the Book of Genesis briefly mentions something called
the “Curse of Ham”, a curse Noah invokes after his son Ham does something gross.
In response, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan to be a servant to his brethren.
This curse is vague and not described in further detail, but someone decided the exact nature
of the curse was that Canaan’s skin got darker, and furthermore that the curse of
ham was a really convenient way to morally justify slavery.
No guys, it’s not morally abhorrent for a good christian to own a living breathing
human being with a soul, it’s just a bloodline curse!
Sure, you didn’t do anything to deserve this, but because one guy did thousands of
years ago, you get a lifetime of agony and humiliation and I’m totally morally cool.
So in short, this approach gets used to passively justify a lot of really fun atrocities because
it’s a lot easier to feel good about yourself as a person if you can blame a bunch of dead
guys for everyone you go out of your way to hurt.
A slightly less gross and more complicated variant happens when the target in question
is in some way actively benefiting from their ancestor’s crime.
This version muddies the question of how much they deserve to be targeted - sure, they didn’t
do the actual bad thing, but they are actively reaping the rewards.
Maybe their predecessor stole the money that made their family rich, or usurped the throne
they sit on, and the avenging antagonist wants justice for what was taken from them.
The target didn’t actually do anything wrong, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t in some
way responsible for their own life and circumstances,
and if those circumstances are built on a
crime, you could argue that they do bear some responsibility to try and mend the damage
of that crime.
Of course, frequently the avenging character makes things morally simpler by going far
beyond “justice” or “fixing the damage done by the original crime” and aiming for
“burn everything to the ground” instead, which is much easier for a hero to categorically
oppose than a complex question about personal responsibility.
Still, this is one of the more nuanced variants, and the target frequently does agree that
they have some responsibility to try and make things right, so that at minimum this kind
of crime doesn’t happen again on their watch.
It’s not their responsibility to suffer for the satisfaction of the avenger, but it
is their responsibility to try and makes things right.
This is also one of those things that has some pretty heavy real-world questions about it.
On the refreshingly fictional side of things, there’s a very simple variant of this trope
where the bad guy is immortal or at least very old and has a grudge against some long-dead
character who just happens to look almost exactly like one of the heroes, and it doesn’t
particularly matter to them that the actual person who wronged them is long gone, they’ll
just take out their aggression
on this conveniently identical stranger.
This version is entirely unjustified and pretty much 100% bad-guys only.
It’s also easily solved with a mustache and a new pair of glasses.
But back into the nuance zone there’s the feuding families variant, where the sins of
the father don’t just fall on one person.
For whatever reason, two groups have been fighting for generations and everyone is held
responsible for the actions of their group, no matter how young and/or innocent they are.
The grudge runs deeper than any actual personal responsibility and the only reason these guys
need to fight is that the other guy is from the other group.
Pretty much the archetypical example of this uniquely stupid variant is Romeo and Juliet,
where the original grudge is literally never
explained - because it doesn’t need to be explained.
This variant probably most clearly illustrates how utterly irrational and self-centered this
vengeance trope is.
The characters don’t even have a reason to hate each other.
What they have is an excuse.
The Capulets and Montagues both have an acceptable target they can take out any and all of their
aggression on whenever they want, and the only reason they need is “our families hate
each other”.
For all we know some 9th century Capulets painted the Montague villa polka-dots and
there’s been blood in the streets of Verona ever since.
Hell, if you wanna extend this trope a little bit into the real world - shocking, I know, let’s
not make a habit of it - this is basically the justification behind any kind of demographic
feud or prejudice.
It’s never about what the individual targeted person did, it’s always about what their group
can be held responsible for.
It’s not a reason to hate or hurt them, it’s an excuse to justify hating and hurting
them, which is in turn being done for personal self-centered reasons - because if you’re
full of anger and hate, it feels really good to take it out on someone, and even better
if you can convince yourself they deserve it.
This is also pretty much the only real-world justification
for war, by the way.
It’s never about what the soldiers or the civilian casualties did to deserve it.
Vengeance isn’t profound or moral or justified or anything particularly deep - it’s just
an inefficient and damaging way to sublimate pain and harmful emotions while seeking some
kind of emotional release or catharsis.
At its best it motivates the pursuit of fairness or balance, asking for retribution for an
injustice or a wrongdoing, but at its worst it morphs into victim-seeking, looking for
“acceptable” or “justifiable” targets to hurt.
Vengeance produces the illusion of righteousness because it’s an understandable and relatable
motivation, but just because someone’s been
hurt doesn’t mean the pain they cause in turn is justified.
The sins of the father trope is one of the easiest ways to trigger a cycle of vengeance
narrative, where a cavalcade of aggrieved people cause enormous amounts of damage that
doesn’t end until someone goes out of their way to break the cycle, frequently at great
personal cost.
See, if Character B hurts Character A and Character A takes revenge on them, they can
easily hurt Character C in the process - even totally incidentally.
Maybe Character C is just hurt because they care about Character B - like, for instance,
if Character B is their parent.
Character A is very careful to only target Character B, but Character C loves Character
B, and there’s no way Character A can hurt Character B without also hurting the totally
innocent Character C. So now Character C is aggrieved and wants vengeance - and it’s
even justifiable!
Character A friggin murdered their parent!
That motivation is so justifiable it’s literally a stock hero motivation!
And when they target Character A, maybe they end up hurting Characters D
and E in the process, who develop vengeance-y
motivations of their own, and so on and so forth.
Every innocent person incidentally hurt for the sins of the father ends up developing
a perfectly justifiable vengeance motivation of their own.
This is the exact plot of six whole greek tragedies.
Even the most carefully formulated vengeance plan will have collateral damage.
The cycle doesn’t stop until someone recognizes that just because they’re in pain doesn’t
mean they have a right to hurt people and stops it.
Vengeance can always be justified, but a justification
is the same thing as an excuse.
At some point, someone needs to pump the brakes and ask what good any of this will actually do.
But with all that said, the “sins of the father” concept is not actually always used
in vengeance tropes.
Sometimes characters feel responsible for the sins of their ancestors all on their own,
no antagonists required.
This comes in three major flavors: one, a character tries to make up for the damage
their ancestor caused, usually by trying to fix stuff they messed up out of a sense of
personal responsibility.
Two, a character constantly deals with annoying problems caused by one of their ancestors,
which has some significant overlap with the “my ancestor is actually the villain” trope.
And three, a character’s ancestor did something really bad and the character worries they
might be doomed to follow in their footsteps.
This is the less spicy “cursed bloodline” variant - maybe the ancestor was some legendary
hero or other super cool dude who failed at a critical moment, and the hero faces the
double-whammy of living up to the high bar their extremely cool ancestor set and not
messing up the same way their much cooler ancestor did.
These uses are comparatively rarer than the vengeance-specific version, since vengeance
is a very popular trope overall, but it is important to recognize that “sins of the
father” doesn’t always mean someone else is holding the character responsible.
Fundamentally, the “sins of the father” trope is a question, and that question is
“who do you hold responsible”?
In its non-vengeance-y variant, the character holds themself responsible for fixing or making
up for the damage their ancestor did, but in the vengeance-y variant, things very easily
escalate out of control, since if the question is “who do I hold responsible for my suffering”,
the anger that suffering caused can volunteer the answer “anyone and everyone you can reach”.
While there’s an argument to be made for someone taking responsibility for the actions
of their ancestors to try and mitigate or fix the damage, there’s no logical reason
to hurt the child for the sins of the father - there's just an emotional reason.
By definition, the child did nothing wrong and thus deserves nothing bad - their only
crime was proximity to the real problem, and they didn't exactly have a choice in the matter.
Because of this, heroic characters usually shy away from their vengeance-based crusades
the minute collateral damage enters the equation, but villainy-inclined characters have more
of a tendency to double down and turn their
targeted vengeance into a more large-scale crusade.
After all, if you squint, maybe the person who hurt you wasn’t solely responsible.
Maybe the society that enabled them was.
Maybe the family that supported them was.
Maybe their friends and loved ones are the real villains for not stopping them.
If the character is just looking for a target, they can always find one - and they can always
justify it, even feel heroic about it.
The cycle only breaks when the character starts asking “how can this be fixed” instead
of “what will make me feel good” - or, more commonly, when they die.
Vengeance crusades have a pretty high mortality rate, especially once the avenging character
crosses the “burn everything to the ground” threshold, which is frequently a pretty easy
next step to take after “target innocent people for the bad stuff someone else did”.
Man, that one got spicier than I expected.
Uh…
So… yeah.
And thanks again to Campfire Blaze for sponsoring this video!
As you may know, Campfire Blaze is a browser-based writing tool designed to help creators stay
organized while you write and worldbuild.
It’s got real-time collaboration tools if
that’s your jam, or you can keep it totally private.
Campfire Blaze’s manuscript module gives you an in-browser word processor you can use
to write without losing track of your worldbuilding
notes, and it automatically saves your project in the cloud.
Plus it’s got an auto-tagging feature that highlights key things in your writing so you
can quickly reference details in the worldbuilding you might’ve lost sight of.
Very useful for building complex
multi-generational feuds!
Campfire Blaze also has dedicated tools for fleshing out locations, maps, cultures, species,
magic systems and more, so you can flesh out the whole story all in one place.
Campfire Blaze also comes with thirteen genre-based
themes like Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance and a
custom theme creator, so you can pick a vibe and set the story’s atmosphere.
Campfire Blaze’s free version is already feature-packed, but if you want more, you
can build your own tool suite and only pay for the modules you need, which run as low
as fifty cents each.
You can also unlock everything for just a few dollars a month - with a 30-day return
policy if you change your mind.
Check out the link in the description, and make sure to use the promo code OSP21 for
20% off a lifetime purchase of Campfire Blaze!