Roaring Rampage of Revenge

"When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements referred to as a "roaring rampage of revenge". I roared. I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction."

—The Bride, Kill Bill, Vol. 2

She's making her list, she's checking it twice, and she's checking off your name after she's killed you, probably for making it personal. And in the above example she's even quoting her own movie poster blurb. But it's okay, you deserve it, because you're evil, kidnapped her child and you probably kicked her dog (if not worse) as well. Either you're a minion or you're the Big Bad behind it all, but it doesn't matter in the end because either way, you're going down... and Joe or Jane Hero is going to be the one to do it, even if it means going down with you.

The Roaring Rampage of Revenge differs from the standard Revenge plot in that our hero dispenses with the Machiavellian plotting that would define a classic revenge tale and goes straight to spilling bad blood, either in a single, violent Unstoppable Rage or Tranquil Fury-fueled rampage on the bad guy's home base, or a more methodical "working one's way up the food chain" from lesser foes to the bigger fish.

If the hero has a specific hit-list, this usually ends up as a Gotta Kill Them All situation as the hero hunts down and kills each bad guy on the list before moving on to the next. In most cases, the second to last bad guy on the hit-list is the Dragon for whichever Big Bad that the hero has saved for last, and is usually someone the hero has an especially personal beef with and/or is the most psychotic or otherwise hateworthy foe on the list aside from the Big Bad.

Alternately the reasoning is that the hero just has a single lead, and each lead gives him/her one more name or clue before they die.

Many such avengers may keep a Tragic Keepsake to remind them of their lost loved one or other reason that they're on this vendetta to begin with, although they may fall victim to Forgotten Fallen Friend if the quest goes on long enough.

Would-be avengers need to be extremely careful about falling into He Who Fights Monsters territory. It's one thing to take revenge on someone who is directly responsible for wronging you, but it's quite another to extend your revenge to that person's children, people who are only tangentially related to the main target, and any innocent bystanders unlucky enough to get in the way. If this happens, then The Hero may cease to be worthy of that title.

Compare Last Stand, where the motives are frequently the same. May be a case of Revenge Before Reason culminating in a Self-Destructive Charge. In other cases, the anger has burned itself out by the end, leaving only a dogged Determinator to finish the task. Also compare to Roaring Rampage of Rescue, where the goal of the rampage is to rescue a loved one rather to exact revenge for what was done to them. The two may overlap.

Examples of Roaring Rampage of Revenge include:

Anime and Manga

  • Shion in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni goes on a delayed one in her arc. She goes a bit far, by which we mean that even after she's killed a little girl who she promised to take care of, she doesn't stop, despite it having become obvious that her family knows nothing about Satoshi's disappearance - although what the rest of the Sonozaki family did to her is pretty damn horrible too.
  • Slayers's Luke is generally a nice, if a bit snarky, guy. But hire assassins to kill the woman he is madly in love with, and then refuse to cure the poison on her? He might get mad.
  • Lucy from Elfen Lied has one of these against Kurama (and all of humanity for that matter).
  • Suzaku from Code Geass goes on a very literal Roaring Rampage of Revenge after the woman he loved, Princess Euphemia is killed, blasting through the battlefield, screaming like a madman as he cuts down anyone in his path. The show's Anti-Hero protagonist, Lelouch, might also qualify since one of his goals is vengeance for his mother, but his is more like Magnificent Bastard Rampage of Revenge.
    • He gets a much more traditional rampage after Shirley is murdered, going out of his way to slaughter everyone connected with Geass - including unarmed scientists and children who are involved with the cult. And boy, does that bite him in the ass later.
      • It should be mentioned that Those "Scientists" are experimenting on said children and turning them into superpowered assassins as part of an elaborate plan to create Instrumentality
    • Nina too. "Vengeance for Euphemia-sama!" indeed.
  • Before the Conviction arc focuses him, Guts of Berserk spends a year or so Walking the Earth as the Black Swordsman, hunting down and killing demonic Apostles and trying to get at Griffith, who betrayed him in a serious way during the Eclipse by sacrificing his friends, and then raping his girlfriend Casca right in front of him. Though his current objective is to Find the Cure for Casca's madness, he's still pissed off at Griffith, and in fact, his big recurring dilemma is that he has to choose between pursuing revenge and protecting what little he still has, which isn't exactly helped by the fact that he has a Super-Powered Evil Side that wants him to kill Casca so that he can get back to his vendetta.
  • In Planetes, Edle used to be married to a man who ended up selling her into prostitution. When the guy has the gall to call her and try to get back together, she shows up at his hotel room with an anchor launcher and threatens to shoot him with it.
  • Parodied in Yotsuba&! after Yotsuba watches one too many Japanese gangster movies: she first takes out Dad and Jumbo with her water pistol, then switches personas and takes revenge by heading next door to shoot the neighbors, one by one, ending with Asagi.
  • In Macross Frontier, Klan goes on one of these after Michel is killed defending her from Vajra.
  • Scar goes on one of these in Fullmetal Alchemist when nearly his entire people, including all of his family are killed during the Ishval Massacre. His plan is to kill every State Alchemist he meets, including those not involved in the Ishval massacre. In both the anime and manga he eventually sees that what he is doing is wrong, and becomes something of The Atoner.
  • The Breaker has Chun Woostart one when his disciple Shi Woon, goes missing. He's angry, as angry as we've ever seen him be. But then Shiho his love interest is killed, taking a bullet for him. He then takes unleashes a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on an entire rooftop of martial artists. And it's not a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • Kurogane no Linebarrel : Kouichi, after reconciling with his childhood friend for his narcissistic behavior and arrogant attitude, slips into this when Yajima is killed in a hail of bullets, followed by an explosion, by a malfunctioning Machina from the Katou Organization. Cradling the amputated limb of his dead friend, needless to say, Kouichi doesn't take it very well.
  • In Fushigi Yuugi Genbu kaiden, after Soruen has a heroic noble sacrifice in the worst tearjerker of the series, Uruki. Gets. Pissed. As in really pissed. As in create a giant tornado pissed.
  • Played with in Narutaru. After Hiroko Kaizuka winds up on the receiving end of Aki Honda and her Girl Posse's unspeakably cruel treatment and her emotionally-abusive dad separates her from her only friend Shiina, when Hiroko finally gets her hands on a Shadow Dragon, things get very bloody very quickly. The Shadow Dragon in question, Oni, maims and kills those who broke her so thoroughly very horribly, with the worst of it reserved for the Alpha Bitch herself, raping her before tearing her body in half. But when Shiina finally catches up to Hiroko herself, she's disturbingly calm as Oni kidnaps and tortures Shiina's father in an attempt to break Shiina's bonds to her family and join her cause.
    • And then Shiina eventually snaps, and it gets worse. Much worse.
  • Rushuna Tendo trashes an entire castle full of armed guards to get to the Jester after she thinks he's killed one of her friends in Grenadier (she's still alive, of course, but in the manga she's not so lucky).
    • She gets in the same mood again before the final showdown in the manga, believing the Jester has just killed her half-sister (she survives).
  • Black Lagoon: Clumsy maid Roberta's master is killed at the start of the El Baile de la Muerte arc. Considering she's also an Ax Crazy Implacable Man ex-FARC member, it gets very, very messy.
  • Goldie Musou has one of these as her Start of Darkness in Gunsmith Cats. Although she was a granddaughter of a Mafia Don, she was a decent human being, but after she found out her parents' death wasn't an accident, she used her extensive knowledge of chemistry to brainwash the family members of the killers, forcing them to kill their own families, and then killing them. By the time she was done she had lost her sense of empathy entirely, and started to consider all people toys or tools for her own amusement.
  • In Death Note, after Light gets his memories back and Rem kills Watari and L for him every sinner he met while he had no memories of the Death Note is in BIG trouble when he gets out that pen and the Ominous Latin Chanting begins.
    • And Matsuda goes on one in the last episode when Light reveals he is Kira and tries to kill Near by writing his name in the Death Note. Matsuda goes into a rage, cries Berserker Tears, and shoots Light several times.
  • This is what happens with Jacuzzi Splot should you be dumb enough to push him out of his normal Shrinking Violet Martyr Without a Cause personality (last time it happened, he went machine guns ablazin' and robbed eighteen speakeasies in one night, with tears streaming down his face). Of course, who you should really worry about is a certain redheaded conductor that does not take too kindly to the death of his mentor. When he finds out who did it, he decides to kill him, bathe himself in his blood, go after his friends, go after his friends' friends, and generally act like Nightmare Fuel incarnate for the next ten episodes or so.
  • In Gintama, Takasugi Shinsuke constantly plots to completely destroy Japanese society in order to avenge his teacher's death and out of resentment for the growing alien influence in Japan, as he had once participated in a failed armed uprising to drive out those very same aliens.
  • A misdirected one in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. After the Book of Darkness was awakened by the two Masked Men disguised as Nanoha and Fate playing Break the Cutie on Hayate, it was no surprise that its first task involved taking revenge by trying to kill Nanoha and Fate.
  • Perpetrated in Yu-Gi-Oh by Thief King Bakura, Spirit of the Millennium Ring way back in the day. Atem's uncle Akunadin killed his entire village to make the millennium items. To get back, the Thief King made a deal with Zorc, and what we see of him in that era consists of going on a murderous rampage against Atem and his court. After stewing for a few millennia, he returns. Sort of.
    • Let's not forget in the Yami vs. Weevil duel during the Doma arc. Yugi's soul has been stolen, and Weevil claims to have his soul card. He rips it in front of Yami's eyes... then taunts him by revealing it was a joke. BAD IDEA, Weevil - Yami goes berserk and deals enough damage to Weevil that turn to effectively defeat him THREE TIMES over. Tea eventually steps in in a What the Hell, Hero? moment, stopping him from continuing to deal damage.
      • And let's not forget that, thanks to the effects of the Seal of Orichalcos, Weevil felt every single sword-strike dealt to him. The look on his face when that 2nd monster card was revealed (2nd out of, I believe, seven...the 2nd being the one that dealt the fatal blow) spoke volumes.
      • This was not simple revenge on the Pharaoh's part. Going off one of the translations of the original text ("Wash your neck and wait," a traditional order to Japanese prisoners before sentence was carrried out) Weevil was handed nothing short of a death sentence. This was not revenge, this was an execution.
  • Sasuke from Naruto. His reason for living was that he wanted to kill his Aloof Big Brother, Itachi, for murdering their clan. When Tobi reveals that Itachi was ordered to kill the Uchiha by Konoha's higher-ups, Sasuke snaps and declares that his new goal is to destroy Konoha in order to avenge Itachi. Previously he had held back on killing or severely injuring bystanders; now he seems to just be attacking anybody and everything that gets in the way.
    • Naruto goes on one when he believes Sasuke has been killed by Haku (who he nearly killed afterwards). Against Neji for beating the hell out of Hinata. Though bringing back Sasuke is his main reason, he'd be more than glad to kill Orochimaru for killing his Grandfather figure, the Third Hokage. He goes apeshit on Deidara when he states he and Sasori managed to kill Gaara. Would've definitely gone after Hidan if Shikamaru couldn't do it since Asuma played an important part in his elemental chakra training. Became dead-set on destroying Pain after he killed his father figure, Jiraiya (although he spares him as Naruto wanted to make Jiraiya's dream of peace a reality). Goes from zero to 6 tails in a blink when he believes Pain killed Hinata. Ironically, he hasn't killed any of them.
      • Naruto did this in the earlier chapters as well when Mizuki tried to kill Iruka. Basically he says "If you ever lay a hand on my sensei again, I'll kill you" and then proceeds to beat Mizuki to a bloody pulp.
      • One of the things that makes Naruto so special is that, even after Pain destroyed Konoha, Naruto refused to go on one of these, in favor of forgiveness.
    • Shikamaru goes on one after Hidan kills his beloved sensei Asuma. This provokes him to chase down and engage Hidan, an immortal, in battle and he defeats him by blowing his body to pieces and burying him alive.
    • Kakashi goes on one of these to, more recently, complete with a Badass Boast beforehand.
  • Slayers Next had a scene close to the end, during an epic match against The Chessmaster Phibrizzo, where Phibrizzo starts using what appear to be beads of life to kill the heroes one by one. When it comes to Amelia's turn, she predictably dies. In Zelgadiss's arms. Zelgadiss spends all of ten seconds trying to wake her up before he charges, attempting to fulfill this trope...of course, it's subverted, because guess who was next?
  • Mahou Sensei Negima has Negi starting one of these when Kurt Godel reveals that he was the one responsible for the destruction of Negi's hometown.
  • Goku has one of these in Dragon Ball. He'd been fighting the Red Ribbon Army for a while, but was never really antagonistic towards him. He just wanted to find his Grandpa's Dragon Ball, the RR army tried to stop him, so he kicked their ass. But when the Army hired Tao-Pai-Pai, the mercenary, to take out Goku, Tao killed the father of Goku's new friend. Goku eventually killed Tao and had his Dragon Ball, but he decided to find the rest of them so he could wish his ally back. So he stormed the Red Ribbon Army base, killed pretty much everyone there, took out the newly-made leader (the former leader was executed by his second in command after the latter learned about the true nature of the original leader's goal involving a wish was completely trivial and actually endangered their existence), and got the Dragon Balls and felled the terrorist army in one fell swoop.
    • The wonderful Irony in this, is that Goku destroying the Red Ribbon Army triggered a thirst of revenge into the Army's chief scientist, Dr Gero, leading him to create a line of killer androids that could kill Goku, and thus being, years later, the origin of the Androids and Cell Sagas, as well as how Earth became a Crapsack World in Trunks' Future Timeline.
    • Let's not forget what happened when Goku's best friend Krillin was killed for the first time. Goku went berserk at this and immediately sought punishment on the demon that had murdered the kid... but this time he wasn't successful, and ended up defeated by said monster.
    • How can one forget how he went Super Mode Saiyan after Frieza explodes Krillin for the hell of it. It was a satisfying when he finally defeated him, very much.
    • Trunks, after taking several levels of badass training in the past and helping in the Cell Saga, goes on one of these upon returning to the future. Now stronger than ever, he proceeds to hunt down the Androids and curbstomps them both with little effort, even shouting "THIS IS FOR GOHAN!" before completely obliterating 18 in one blast. Adding even more to it is the fact he makes the entire fight one long Reason You Suck Speech, rubbing in the fact he's going to make them feel exactly how they made his friends feel when they killed them. Not quite finished yet, he then waits for Cell to come after him, knowing that with the Androids dead, Cell will try and get his time machine to return to the past, then when he shows up destroy him as well. While this particular Cell really hadn't done anything to Trunks yet, he's still a mass murderer in this timeline as well and Trunks knows it, so it still counts. What makes this even better is Trunks was really toying with Cell before finishing him off, exactly how Cell likes to do it.
      • After a meal, he curbstomps the monster. After a near-death experience and a nearly-lethal power up, he beats up the guy who sent the monster.
  • I Luv Halloween. After Mr. Kitty and Finch set a man's wife on fire, the man goes on a vicious rampage to hunt the evil, little trick-or-treaters down. He endures being attacked and bitten by a handful of zombies and set on fire until finally falling.
  • In chapter 392 Bleach, Hitsugaya fits this trope particularly well. He confronts Aizen for the first time since the latter's defection from the Soul Society, telling him that swinging a blade in pure anger is just violence, not as a duty of a captain and that Aizen could not call that a true fight; when Aizen then asks Hitsugaya if his hatred had vanished since Hinamori, Hitsugaya's childhood friend and Aizen's former lieutenant, was alive after Aizen had stabbed her, Hitsugaya tells Aizen he did not come here to merely fight him, but to do violence to him. Things take a rather nasty turn for him in chapter 392, after Aizen sets up an illusion to fool Hitsugaya into thinking that he's stabbed Aizen, when in reality, he's stabbed Hinamori. If the face Hitsugaya makes upon realizing what's happened does not scream roaring rampage of revenge, I don't know what will.
    • In chapter 477 Tsukishima goes on one, when he thought Ginjou had died. He attacks Ichigo and Rukia not with the intent to Mind Rape them as usual but with the intent to kill. And screams at Riruka to "MOVE!!!" when she protects them, which is a stark contrast to his normally calm and composed manner.
    • And let's not forget how Yumichika went absolutely nuts when he thought Ikkaku had been killed, threatened Hisagi when he wouldn't let him run to Ikkaku's aid, and eventually had to be knocked out by Kira.
  • Kare Kano: played for laughs when Tsubasa, angered that Arima loves Yukino, goes too far, she finally pushes Yukino into a rampage which shocks and awes much of the school; Yukino's Art Shift gives her a suitably demonic cast as she mercilessly pursues her terrified prey...
  • In spite of all the different reasons the characters in Rave Master give, in the end Lucia's actions are really just him lashing out at the world as a whole for making his childhood a living hell.
  • In the 7th Hellsing OVA Zorin has just severely wounded Seras and killed Pip. To add insult to injury she then refers to the dead Pip as a mere insect. Cue Seras completely losing her shit and slaughtering Zorin's army and Zorin herself.
  • Chiba of Wolf Guy Wolfen Crest does this upon coming back to life by going after Haguro for brutally raping and murdering him.
    • Also deliberately invoked when Haguro manipulates the younger Kuroda into going Columbine on half the student body out of vengeance against Inugami for his brother's death. Using weapons from his family gun cellar. The kicker? His brother died because HAGURO pulled his life-support.
  • Akumetsu: Most everything was a result of Shou responding to Katsuragi's death. Additionally, his retaliation when his teacher is shot in the 3-B incident.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: Gendo does a Shoot the Dog moment when faced with the 13th Angel, Bardiel, who had just taken control of the Eva Unit 03 moments before the first test was supposed to start. When Shinji refused to destroy the Angel (and the Eva with it) due to the risk of injuring the Eva's pilot, Gendo takes control of the situation and takes Eva Unit 01 from Shinji's control, using a backup system to do the deed. Needless to say, Shinji isn't happy, and attempts a Roaring Rampage of Revenge... before being stopped by Gendo himself.
    • This goes down differently, and more true to the trope, in Rebuild of Evangelion, where rather than being locked into the launch cage and threatening to escape (how the hell did they get an Evangelion which was actively about to go on a destructive rampage into a launch cage?) Shinji is next seen stomping a mudhole into the top of the Geofront with Unit 01. As before, Gendo increases the pressure of the LCL and the rampage is stopped short. However, later on, when Rei Ayanami/Unit 00 is devoured by Zeruel (the devouring only happens in the movie, but otherwise is quite similar), Shinji gets in Unit 01 again. Unit 01 comes to a stop while working its way through Zeruel, out of power, and this is where the true road cone of the series starts. In the series, Shinji devolves into a sobbing heap, and Unit 01 goes berserk on its own, eventually devouring the Angel in the process. In Rebuild, Shinji growls out furiously, "Give Ayanami back." And those words Unit 01 stands back up, now beginning the process of starting Third Impact - and the process of stomping Zeruel flat. Long story short. Do not, ever, make Shinji want vengeance.
    • It's implied that Misato is doing this as well: she always hated her father but when he gave his life to save her during Second Impact, she went on to discover what really happened. Upon finding out that the Angels were responsible, she joined NERV and is now ruthlessly manipulating Shinji into exterminating the Angels for her. Of course she denied it when Ritsuko accused her of it, but seriously - she freakin' offered her body to a boy half her age as an incentive to make him keep risking his own life for her. True, she hates herself for it - but then she does it again in End of Evangelion, minutes before dying.
  • Yu Yu Hakusho: After Sensui kills Yusuke, Kuwabara, Hiei, and Kurama set out on one of these jointly. Kurama transforms, Hiei releases his Kokuryuuha, and Kuwabara slices apart the barrier with his new Jigen-to in their fury. They chase him all the way into Makai for the express purpose of killing him. However, despite the rage power-up, they're still horribly outclassed and Sensui kicks the crap out of them.
    • Actually played straight earlier in the Dark Tournament arc. Kuwabara is severely wounded by Younger Toguro and Yusuke gets the needed boost of power to fight Toguro on equal terms. Funny in that it was a setup just to get Yusuke angry enough to use his full power. Even Toguro was in on it. In the above example it's even mentioned that Yusuke was doing the exact same thing Kuwabara had done. Except Yusuke knew he wasn't gonna survive.
    • Played straighter when Younger Toguro KILLS Genkai in front of his eyes; it was worth watching what Yusuke does to him in the final round.
  • Giriko from Soul Eater goes on one against Soul and Maka following Arachne's death.
  • When his friend Kimishima dies Kazuma of S-Cry-ed flips his lid, finding the nearest HOLY unit and totally decimating it.
  • When Kodai finally gets his claws on Zorua, the little guy's mother Zoroark finally has enough and proceeds to tear her way out of her prison (a steel-encased metal cage that severely shocks her whenever she touches it and to that point was unable to break out of) and go one one of these. She is delayed by a misunderstanding with the town's guardian Olympus Mons (though this is part of the reason she fought three Legendary Pokémon to a standstill), but once it's settled, she proceeds to one-shot The Dragon and his Pokémon, then moves on to hunt down Kodai and, while she doesn't actually physically hurt him, sets up his humiliating defeat and reclaims her baby. And he was likely quite lucky the cops got to him before she could.
    • In the manga version, she actually kills Kodai by making him fall off the top of the stadium to his Disney Villain Death.
  • In Holyland, Yuu goes on one of these after Shinichi is attacked by Sawako gang members.
  • Gun X Sword bases its entire plot on this. The entire thrust of the series is Van seeking revenge on the Claw for killing his bride. It gets more complicated than that, but the final confrontation comes down to a man seeking revenge, the man he seeks revenge on, and a sword in one man's hand. Nobody else is present. Nobody else is involved.
  • In Katanagatari after Togame dies in Shichika's arms the main protagonist proceeds to climb a pagoda to the Shogun and destroy every weapon he had spent the last year collecting a long with most of the poor saps who were using them at the time, in what can only amount to a series of consecutive Curb Stomp Battles leading up to the inevitable confrontation with The Dragon who killed Togame previously in which the only damage that was inflicted was the damage Shichika allowed. Did I mention this guy was fighting them all unarmed?
  • Hakkai from Saiyuki massacred at least 1,000 demons plus an entire village of humans because some of the demons kidnapped and raped his sister/lover and because the rest didn't stop the poor girl's kidnapping for fear that the demons would target their family members instead.
  • Kekkaishi - After one of the Co-Dragons Kaguro kills Gen, Yoshimori goes on Roaring Rampage of Revenge, allowing himself to be captured by Kokuboro just so that he can kill the bastard with his own hands.
  • Gantz - Hiroto Sakurai goes absolutely ballistic once he found his girlfriend, Tonkotsu, dead during the latest arc. In a total berserk state, he decides to dish out ultimate pain on the invading aliens (who are, easily, 30 times his size) by blowing their brains up with his psychic powers of mass murder, not sparing a single one. Not even children or elderly. And he's still at it. I certainly wouldn't want to cross in this guy's way.
  • In Hunter X Hunter, Gon snaps when Neferpitou tells him that Kaitou isn't just Pitou's puppet, he's dead. By Pitou's hand. Furious at Pitou and even more furious at himself for leaving Kaitou behind to die, Gon decides that the only thing that matters now in life is killing Pitou in the most brutal fashion possible. And so he does by using a Deadly Upgrade that ages him to an adult, shortens his lifespan, and comes with the risk of never being able to use nen again after it wears off. And Gon still loses an arm for his effort.
    • Nobunaga and Uvogin also had a lot of Ho Yay between them, so much so that the former really wanted to kill Kurapika for killing the latter.
  • In Zettai Karen Children, the main reason Big Bad Kyosuke doesn't use his powers to off Minamoto is because he knows that if he does, Kaoru is going on one of these- right at him.
  • Pandora Hearts: Break pretty much went batshit crazy when he thought Reim had died.
  • Tsuna of Katekyo Hitman Reborn went on one against Byakuran following Gamma and Uni's Heroic Sacrifice. He kinda hit Byakuran with an X-burner so hard that Byakuran vaporized. Scary...
  • In Durarara!! Shinra took a knife for Izaya and Izaya's reaction is to extract revenge on the person that stabbed him, Nakura, and continue to to torment him well after they graduate. This is one of the few times that Izaya shows human behavior.
  • Raikou of Nabari no Ou is protective of Gau to the point that when a mook hurts Gau, Raikou goes completely berserk, kills him, and mutilates his dead body.
  • Salaryman Kintaro, Yajima Kintaro, former leader of a ten thousand man motorcycle gang, calls his old followers to active duty to start a Roaring Rampage of Revenge when the leaders of a construction company and yakuza nearly killed his mentor and his son with bombs disguised as a box of sweets and a child's Animals of Africa pop-up book. Thankfully he is stopped just before ordering his people to drive their cars straight through the yakuza headquarters. Although some of his followers do manage to tie up the construction company big wigs and hang them out their office windows.
  • Azumanga Daioh: When Yomi manages to eat curry noodles without splattering it all over herself, Tomo is pushed over the top and goes on a rampage in the lunchroom with tears in her eyes until she accidentally hits Yukari. Yukari's subsequent reaction must be seen to be believed.
  • In A Certain Scientific Railgun, Misaka Mikoto has just met her clone for the first time, and evidence is piling up that she is about to participate in an experiment that will end in her death. She goes to the designated spot and watches Accelerator brutally murder the clone. When trying to kill him doesn't work, she destroys thirty research laboratories in three days to try and stop the program.

(in flashback) Kuroko: What would you do if a clone of yours appeared before you?
Mikoto: Ah, that would freak me out. I think I would wish it would just disappear.
(present): Mikoto goes ballistic on Accelerator)

Comic Books

  • The Crow by James O'Barr - When his fiancee is raped and murdered by drugged-up hoodlums, Eric doesn't let the fact that they killed him too get in the way of his Roaring Rampage. Said Rampage is arguably more visceral, violent and over the top than it was in the subsequent movie adaptation, and the actual nature of Eric's literal physical resurrection not explained as clearly.
  • Screw with Batman and you'll either wind up in a hospital for the rest of your life, crying yourself to sleep each night or want to die immediately due to recurring nightmares involving a half-man, half-bat demon or go far far into the world and pray to god that he doesn't ever find you again. More than likely, you'll be going through at least two of these after your encounter with him. There's a reason career crime in Gotham breeds mental illness.
    • The Murderer/Fugitive arc has Bruce framed for the murder of his old love Vesper Fairchild and is wrongly imprisoned (score another one for the GCPD). Bruce escapes from prison to fight crime as Batman (since his Bruce Wayne persona was slowly slipping away) and cuts off all communication with the rest of the Bat-family. Long story short, as soon as Batman slowly starts picking up the clues of the people who framed him. HE. MAKES. THEM. PAY. DEARLY. After his fight with the commandos nearly everyone who he fought will need to see a psychiatrist. Or a priest.
    • Scarecrow has had a few of these, notably the incidents with his prom and grandmother.
    • Nightwing, after seeing his apartment building (with his neighbors inside) blown up and his circus destroyed by Blockbuster, hunted down and brutally beat down every one of his costumed mooks.
      • Nightwing is prone to this. During KnightsEnd, he tore into Jean-Paul Valley after thinking Bruce was killed by a booby-trapped Batmobile and during Joker: The Last Laugh, he actually killed the titular villain when he thought Tim Drake had died.
  • X-Men spinoff X-Factor shows even an enemy's simulator knows that if you hurt/kill Rictor, Shatterstar's Roaring Rampage Of Revenge would come next, quickly followed by your demise.
  • Marv of Sin City goes on one of these when his lady of the night Goldie is murdered and he is framed for the crime.
    • And in Sin City: Family Values, Dwight and Miho cut a swath through the Sin City Mafia to avenge the shooting of a prostitute.
    • Wallace of Hell and Back also goes on one of these when Esther, the woman he saves from suicide, is kidnapped.
  • In The Sandman, Hippolyta Hall sends the Furies Kindly Ones to attack the Dreaming because she thinks Morpheus killed her son.
  • In all adaptations of The Punisher, the entire plot revolves around this, to the point where its less a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and more of a Roaring Marathon of Revenge. In the comic, Frank Castle's family was killed when they stumbled upon a mob execution while having a picnic in a park. In revenge, Frank kills the people responsible and then goes on to kill all the other criminals he can find. In the movie, Frank was once in the FBI, and his family was specifically targeted.
  • The Incredible Hulk goes on one of these in the Crossover World War Hulk. Why? The six most influential people in the Marvel Universe secretly shot him into outer space to die, except he landed on a savage planet that accepted and loved him for what he was. Then the ship he arrived in exploded, nuked the planet, and killed the Hulk's alien wife.
    • Marvel had recently retconned several of its main heroes into such utter douchebags that even though the Hulk was technically the villain of the story, most readers were rooting for him to smash the jerks.
      • Not that they were guilty of nuking a planet, mind; Hulk just thought they were. In reality, one of his teammates turned out to be Ax Crazy and had triggered it on purpose, to prompt one of these rampages, because the only time he found meaning in his life was fighting side by side with the Hulk against somebody. Hulk thought there must have been a bomb on the ship, but in truth the villain just messed with the engine. Also, many writers agreed with the fans that the heroes were being written poorly; you were probably supposed to root for the Hulk, even if you kind of figured out that the heroes were at least partly Misblamed and the truth would be found out at the end. There was still a sense that they had brought this on themselves.
    • There was a What If? of that story where the Hulk died in the explosion instead of his wife, and she came to Earth on a roaring rampage of revenge instead. The end result was much, much worse.
  • Besides The Punisher, Marvel's other resident revenger Wolverine has been featured in some high spotlight revenge arcs. Kinda hard to avoid when you're a killing machine with a hair-trigger temper.
    • The Marvel event Civil War kicked off because a lone villain named Nitro blew up a small town in Connecticut. While all the heroes were slap-fighting each other over federal legislation, guess who it was that hunted down and tried to destroy Nitro for his mass murder?
    • His biggest however has been in the Alternate Universe story "Old Man Logan," where after returning home to his family with the money needed to pay of their debtors, he finds them murdered by those he owes because "they were bored." He forsakes his fifty years of pacifism in order to exact some very bloody satisfaction of his own. Given the reason he gave up snikting bubs in the first place, this is a pretty huge character shift.
    • And don't forget about Matsu'o, who commissioned the murder of Logan's lover Mariko. Every year on the anniversary of Mariko's death Logan cuts off a little bit more of Matsu'o; he's currently missing his right arm, right ear, nose, and gall bladder. If it weren't for Comic Book Time he'd probably be a head in a jar before his death. Wolverine said his punishment wasn't over but finally relented and let Psylocke finish him off.
    • Then there's Mark Millar's "Enemy of the State" and "Agent of SHIELD" arcs where Hydra, The Hand, AIM, and upstart group Dawn Of The White Light lure Logan in by kidnapping and killing an innocent child. Then they brainwash him and send him after the super-hero community like the weapon he once was. When he gets his mind back, he reprograms a Sentinel to kill the hundreds of members of the Dawn of the White Light mutant group, then kills thousands of Hand members, then kills 40,000+ Hydra agents, then slices up the dozens of thugs who were tangentially related to just the kidnapping aspect.
    • And then there's his horror movie style hunting down of a bunch of guys who broke the spirit of a nun to the point where she begged Wolverine to make them suffer, which he did on the five year anniversary of her death (they didn't kill or even harm the nun, just broke her spirit with fake execution after fake execution, and Logan was avenging the loss of her innocence). And his slaughter of the pirates/slavers who hijacked a plane carrying one of Mariko's personal secretary was in part to avenge those that they'd murdered or worse over the years. And the slapstick one he did on the Madripoor underworld using Mr. Fixit as a proxy.
    • Suffice to say, Roaring Rampage of Revenge is Wolverine's primary mode of communication.
  • Near the end of the comic book series 52, Black Adam's wife and brother-in-law are killed. As it was the death of his first wife that caused his original fall from grace, it is unsurprising that the death of the second led to him going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, wiping out the country that harbored the murderers, and anybody else that stood in his way. It doesn't end well, though, as the nerdy Mad Scientists behind her death soundly kick his ass with SCIENCE.
    • And when he escapes from that, he just declares bloody vengeance on the entire world, leading to the week long World War III.
  • Abslom Daak, from the Doctor Who Magazine comics. Because they killed his lover (whose corpse, now cryogenically frozen, makes her into a literal woman in a refrigerator) he's gonna kill every last stinking Dalek in the galaxy. Implicitly, a bit of a lunkhead, which got made explicit when he got to meet the Doctor, who took the mickey out of him.
    • But ultimately (and posthumously) he was honored for a Heroic Sacrifice with a new moniker: "Abslom Daak, Life-Giver".
  • In Jon Sable Freelance, Sable went on one of these after his family was murdered.
  • Swamp Thing returns to earth after a forced exile. Step one is to kill the people responsible for his unexpected interstellar journey.
  • The titular V has the titular vendetta in V for Vendetta, coldly eliminating everyone who worked at the camp where he was imprisoned, then moving on to overthrowing the government and killing everyone who was responsible for the very existence of said camp in the first place. Just before his work is done, he dies, and leaves the very last step and the cleaning up afterwards to Evey.
  • Subverted in Fables. Flycatcher wants to go on one of these after remembering what the Empire's soldiers did to his family, but Boy Blue refuses to teach him the secrets of the Witching Cloak that would let him do this, because he doesn't want to corrupt the only truly innocent Fable left. Ironically, this leads to him taking out the Empire's most powerful magic source, and causing far more damage to the Empire's armies than he ever could have on a RROR without ever killing a single soul.
  • After the apparent death of Batman in Final Crisis, Superman returns to Bludhaven with a Roaring Rampage of Heat Vision, taking down as many of Darkseid's troops as he can see.
    • Pretty sure he was just blasting open the way into Command-D. He's Superman, he doesn't kill people, especially not mind-controlled innocents - and he's never shown to.
  • The DC Anti-Hero Deadshot goes on one in the second half of his 1988 miniseries.
    • "Put your hands on the table..."
    • It's a double example, actually; he concludes another one in the first issue, when he finally finds and kills the last remaining guy who abused him in prison.
  • The entire plot of the Luna brothers' The Sword is Dara Brighton's vengeance quest against the three demigod siblings who murdered her family.
  • Ultimate Hawkeye goes on an especially inspiring one after his wife and kids are murdered and he is taken captive by a black ops team sent by Black Widow. As part of his escape he kills his guards with the fingernails he's torn off his own fingertips via his effectively superhuman ability to use anything as a lethal projectile. After killing an additional squad sent to subdue him, he takes their guns, grins into the security camera, and tells the rest of the base, "Run."
    • Ultimate Marvel recently re-introduced the Ghost Rider, distilling his origin as he and his lover Roxanne were innocents killed as human sacrifices, so the perpetrators could bargain for power from Mephisto. As it turns out, Ultimate Johnny Blaze sold his soul to Mephisto, too. All so Roxanne could be spared the suffering, and Johnny could hunt and kill the monsters that did this to them. Just one problem: One of the sacrificers is now the U.S. vice-president.
  • Johnny in Strontium Dog goes on a massive one across several planets after Max Bubba kills Wulf.
  • In both the movie and the original comics, Tony Stark goes on a short but absolutely kickass one of these after the terrorists who have been holding him and another man (Yinsen) hostage end up killing Yinsen. In response, Tony takes the badass suit of armor he designed and built in a cave, with a box of scraps and a goddamned improvised forge, and then breaks the fuck out and proceeds to use the suit's built-in flamethrowers to kill everyone stupid enough not to run away screaming, and then he explodes the entire terrorist hideout, thus quite effectively taking out anyone who managed to avoid being roasted to death. It is all very much a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • In Ms. Tree, Michael practically makes a career of this. Any time there is an attack on her, her family or her friends, this is almost guaranteed to be a huge stack of enemy corpses at the end of it. It got to the stage where The Mafia didn't want to mess with her because it was too costly for them.
  • Most of the Red Lantern Corps are on one in one form or another, given that their superpowers are fueled by rage driven by loss, and as such that rage tends to fixate on the ones responsible for that loss. It's also such an overpowering rage that they tend to take down anyone and anything that gets in their way as well. Special mention must go to the Red Lantern of Earth, Dex-Starr. He's a housecat, and is trying to avenge the kindly old lady who owned him.
  • While there are many of these in the series an obvious example takes place within IDW's Transformers run, during Cliffjumper's Spotlight comic. Crashing on a world he manages to create a strong bond between himself and one of the locals called Kita. A few days after his arrival Decepticons arrive and manage to injure Cliffjumper and shoot Kira in the back when she attempts to run. The Decepticons call for backup in hunting him down leading to this brief exchange upon figuring out just who it is they've managed to piss off:

Decepticon 1: Did you say "little red runt"?
Decepticon 2: Yeah, little red-
Decepticon 1: Small?
Decepticon 2: Yeah.
Decepticon 1: About so high?
Decepticon 2: Yeah.
Decepticon 1: Horns?
Decepticon 2: Yeah, but-
Decepticon 1: Arm yourselves!

  • In the Disney series Paperinik New Adventures, this is what drives the character of Xadhoom. Having seen her entire planet destroyed and her people reduced to mindless slaves, she swore revenge on the alien race that caused it, the Evronians. Unfortunately for the Evronians, Xadhoom had recently become one of the most destructive forces in the Universe, having the destructive power of a super nova. Xadhoom now hunts the Evronians all over the Universe, killing as many of them as she can. (And that's a lot.)
    • To better illustrate, here's her last act. After she destroyed the Evronian mobile throneworld (think a starship the size of a small moon) and before becoming a sun to help the last survivors of her people, she prepared an artifact that contained a copy of her memory and mind. An attempt to leave a memory of her and a copy of her immense knowledge (like how to become like her. She actually told her people they should have become like her, as she was basically immortal and undefeatable, before becoming a sun), you think. It later turns out she had also sent her father out to lure at least a last Evronian into stealing it to acquire the secret of her power, so she could tell him how... And enjoy how he would get destroyed by that power and the lack of the needed self-control: the readers already knew she had a self-control bigger than even herself thought possible (as shown that one time she was so furious everybody including her expected her to go nova but she ONLY destroyed four roofs of a skyscraper, and when the Evronians finally captured her and tried to torture her into becoming an eternal energy source but she resisted pretty easily), but given how impulsive and furiously she acts you would never expect it. And yes, she disintegrated a last Evronian in the most humiliating possible fashion after having practically died, and set things up to continue as long as the surviving Evronians will fall for it.
  • Spider-Man has one in the first "Sin-Eater" story arc. The Sin-Eater is murdering people left and right, and one of his victims is Captain Jean DeWolfe. As she was one of Spider-Man's friends and supporters, he takes her death very hard and this adventure very personally. Ultimately, Spider-Man finds the Sin-Eater (who has no superpowers, by the way) and brutally beats him to a pulp. If not for Daredevil, Spider-Man seemed quite likely to kill him.
    • A somewhat similar incident occurs in the Ultimate series. A punk dressed up as Spider-Man had been robbing banks and destroying the little amount of good reputation that Peter had built up when taking down Doc Ock for the first time. While robbing an armored truck, the imposter is confronted by Police Captain Stacey, father of Peter's friend Gwen, and a bullet ignites the plastic explosives in the criminal's backpack. He quickly shrugs it off and throws it away, and it arcs right towards a nearby child. Stacey, in keeping with the death of the character in the original universe, throws the child out of harm's way and is killed when the explosives detonate. Later on, Peter hears a report that the imposter is attempting to rob another place and finally confronts his double face to face. After a brutal beat-down, Peter locks his hands around the man's throat and very nearly strangles him to death while screaming his fury into his face.
    • In The Night Gwen Stacy Died, after Gwen dies, Peter brutally beats the crap of The Green Goblin and nearly kills him until he comes to his senses
      • he does die, though, when he tries to impale Peter but get impaled instead.
    • In the Grim Hunt storyline, the Kravinov family had been messing with Spidey for weeks and eventually killed several of his superpowered friends. Spider-Man goes berserk, taking out the whole clan and even used his wall-crawling grip to tear off a chunk of Sasha Kravinov's face.
  • Used as an Invoked Trope in the recent Thor and Journey Into Mystery comics. The only reason no one has killed the reincarnated-as-a-kid Loki yet for his past deeds is because Thor has sworn to do exactly this trope if anyone hurts Loki and he finds out about it. Or if Loki just suddenly dies, even if there's no proof, because Thor's not an idiot.
  • This is the plot of the first story arc of Jennifer Blood: the eponymous anti-heroine is out to wipe out the organized crime family that murdered her father and drove her mother to suicide. Of course, her father had been the head of that family, and the men who killed him were all her uncles. The subsequent story arc seems to be shaping up to be that the relatives of three assassins who had been hired by her uncles and whom Jennifer had killed along the way are now determined to track down the person who killed their loved ones and kill her and all her loved ones....

Fan Works

  • In Twisted, the sequel to the Axis Powers Hetalia fanfic "World Financial Crisis Gangbang," America kills the countries that brutally raped him.
  • Spock in Atlas basically orders one of these when he feels his lover Jim Kirk killed through the mating bond they share. It results in probably one of the coolest lines ever to be delivered by a vengeful Vulcan; "Find her. Prevent her goals. Destroy her plans. Break her dog. Lay waste to all who gather around her. Ensure that she comes to regret ever hearing the name James Tiberius Kirk." This is eventually carried out in a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • In the Galaxy Rangers fanfic "Chrysalis," the Queen manages to break Zachary by torturing his Rangers in front of him, making him think he witnessed Niko's execution, casually discussing her plans for Earth in front of him, and following it up with telepathic Mind Rape. When Niko actually comes back with the BETA fleet, the Queen, in a rage, starts to kill her in front of Zach. He flips out, grabs the Queen, puts them BOTH in the Psychocrypt, activates his bionics without having access to his badge and blasts her into ash.

"If it will end the nightmare, then I don't care. I'm already dead. This is for the two years of my life you've stolen from me, you BITCH!!!"

  • Abused daughter Batel of ToyHammer's roaring part of her rampage of revenge begins when she calls out her step-father, while giving in to her more evil nature. Not much detail on what exactly, but the sadistic man treated the mother and daughter both like 'toys', so the worst can be assumed.
    • Her revenge started earlier with a very ill-advised pact with the Chaotic Evil Chaos Gods.
  • In the Family Guy fanfic Attack of the 100 Foot Meg Griffin, well...guess what happens at one point.
  • In Twisted Colors, this is Gadvein's...whole reason for existing: killing the fuck out of everyone who ever supported Britannia in the EU, or anyone who supported Kyrl, or anyone who supports anyone who supports Britannia...he has a humongous list of people he wants dead, and he is not stopping until every single one is dead.
  • In the Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic Chong Sheng, Katara goes on one of these when the Rough Rhinos taunt her after torturing and murdering Jet right in front of her. Though it warrants mentioning that the distinct lack of roaring on her part is what makes it Nightmare Fuel.
  • In The Servants of Ungoliant, Daurin goes on one of these against a group of Gongs after they brutally slaughter several Elves.


Film

  • In Kill Bill, the main protagonist goes on a rampage upon seeing anybody who betrayed her at her wedding rehearsal.
  • Kill Bill was inspired by the film and manga series Lady Snowblood, which is about Oyuki, a female assassin on her own Roaring Rampage of Revenge for the murder of her mother's family and the rape of her mother. The mother had Oyuki in prison after killing the first of her four tormentors and being caught by the police, and before she died, she charged her daughter with taking vengeance upon the other three that she was unable to kill.
  • The Joshuu Sasori (Female Prisoner Scorpion) series, another inspiration for Kill Bill, features an ordinary woman imprisoned after botching her attempt at revenge. The thing that keeps her going is her desire to wreak vengeance on her rapists and on the detective she loved, who set the rape up purely in order to catch her rapists. Most of the film deals with the run-up to her roaring rampage, but she doesn't mess about once she starts.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger goes on a few:
    • John Matrix in Commando goes on one of these when his daughter is kidnapped. "Remember when I said I'll kill you last? I lied."
    • Raw Deal, on behalf of his friend.
    • Collateral Damage.
    • Conan the Barbarian. "Crom, I have never prayed to you before; I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought or why we died. No, all that matters is that two stood against many. That's what important. Valor pleases you, Crom, so grant me one request: grant me REVENGE. And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!"
  • In Taken, Liam Neeson warns: "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." The bad guy is less than impressed by this Badass Boast, to his great misfortune.
  • In the film, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Peter sees the White Witch stab his brother, he immediately slashes his way through the enemy to get to her.
  • The Mariachi from Desperado takes on an entire town full of bad guys, including no fewer than two Bad Guy Bars, in order to get to Bucho, his own brother and apparent boss of the murderer of the woman he loved.
  • The Crow franchise is built around spirits of the dead who cannot rest in the afterlife until they return as an unstoppable revenant and kill those responsible for their and loved ones' deaths. The original creator of the comic series conceived of the idea out of his own desires to get revenge on the drunk driver responsible for the death of his fiance. He later regretted making revenge so appealing.
  • Clint Eastwood westerns often revolve around this trope
    • In Hang 'Em High, Eastwood's character only wants to bring the men who almost killed him to justice,[1] but most of them fight back, turning his quest into a bloodbath.
    • Pale Rider
    • High Plains Drifter implies that Eastwood's character is a dead man's ghost returned for revenge on the town that betrayed him
    • In Unforgiven, Eastwood's character reverts to his murderous ways to avenge a friend's death
  • The premise behind Death Wish, in which a regular joe played by Charles Bronson goes on a vigilante killing spree after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by three punks.
    • The first sequel, Death Wish II, fits more into this trope than the others, with Kersey hunting down and killing five gang-punks who rape and kill both his housekeeper and his daughter.
    • Death Wish 3 sees the vigilante unleashed again when Kersey's old war buddy is shot by more gang punks, and intensifies when he fails to save two more women.
    • Death Wish 4 The Crackdown has Kersey going after two drug gangs after his girlfriend's daughter dies of an overdose.
    • Death Wish V the Face of Death has Kersey trying to settle down with another girlfriend until the bad guys she's trying to testify against disfigure her and later shoot her in the back.
  • The western Tombstone, in which Wyatt Earp swears to wipe out an entire band of outlaws who ambushed his brothers. This was based on a Real Life feud, though the actual story was a little less black and white as the movie and Earp himself would have us believe.
  • Henri Lagardère in Le Bossu kills each of the murderers of his master, chasing them all over Europe.
  • Both Major Henry West and Jim from Twenty Eight Days Later have some degree of this. After he and his two female companions get brutalized by a squad of soldiers, normal joe Jim gets dangerous and goes on a cathartic rampage, gouging out one soldier's eyes with his thumbs. Major West, seeing what's become of his "boys," loses what precious little sanity he had left.
  • Man on Fire has Denzel Washington's character systematically torturing and murdering everyone who is even tangentially related to the kidnapping of his young ward. Amazingly, this is a toned down version of the book.
  • Sergio Leone liked to use revenge as a theme in some of his spaghetti westerns.
    • In Once Upon a Time in the West Charles Bronson plays a nameless drifter who obviously has a serious beef against Henry Fonda's Frank, going as far as to protect him from his other enemies just so he can have the privilege of killing Frank himself. In the end, we find out that he's avenging his brother.
    • Lee Van Cleef played the avenger role alongside the Man With No Name in For a Few Dollars More. Here, his target is El Indio, a notorious outlaw who gunned down his sister's lover and then raped her, leading to the sister taking her own life.
  • The titular killer whale in Orca the Killer Whale lives up to the killer part after whalers kill his mate and calf. Fear the Papa Wolf whale rage!
  • In Pumpkinhead, Lance Henriksen summons the eponymous demon of vengeance after some teens accidentally run over his son. The demon is so brutal that Henriksen quickly has a My God, What Have I Done? moment.
  • In the backstory of The Usual Suspects, semi-mythical criminal mastermind Keyser Soze is faced with other gangsters who try to take over his business by threatening to kill his family. Instead, he kills his family himself, then the gangsters, then their wives, children, friends, and anyone else even tangentially associated with them, and then vanishes into legend.
  • Ms. 45 has a deaf woman going on one of these rampages after she was brutally raped twice.
  • The last twenty minutes of Wanted.
  • John Preston goes on a calmer version of this trope in the final scenes of Equilibrium after the woman he loves is executed by the Librian government and he is suckered into leading the resistance into a trap.
  • Patrick Swayze does this at the end of Road House. The lesson? You can mess with a man's bar. You can threaten his life. But kill his mentor and father figure? Buy your cemetery plot now and save time.
  • In Attack of the Clones, Anakin's one of these following his mother's death is a key part of his slide into The Dark Side. He butchers an entire encampment of Tusken Raiders, and goes down in their legends as a vengeful desert spirit.
    • At around the same time in the Star Wars universe, Qymaen jai Sheelal (later known as General Grievous) devastated an entire empire after his partner was killed.
  • In Return of the Jedi, Luke goes psycho on Vader for merely threatening to go after his sister Leia.
  • One of these is the final act of The Dark Knight.
  • The title character in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, after failing to kill his intended target, Judge Turpin, has an epiphany that "they all deserve to die" and starts cutting throats indiscriminately.
  • Mel Gibson either loves this trope or loves making money off of it. Probably both.
    • Mad Max, Gibson's very first starring role, is based on a disenchanted cop who wants to retire with his family, until his family is slaughtered by a biker gang and he comes back to kill each and every one of them.
    • Payback is about a dirty rotten scoundrel who goes on a rampage after being cheated out of his share of a heist. The amount? $70,000. One of his future victims upon finding out: "Hell, my suits are worth more than that!"
    • Braveheart, inspired by the possibly Real Life rampage of revenge of William Wallace, whose wife Marian was said to have been killed by the English.
      • There's no historical evidence for that whatsoever. Reliable historical records regarding Wallace are few and far between; it's not known if he was even married, much less what his (hypothetical) wife's name was or how she might (hypothetically) have died.
    • The Patriot features Gibson's character as well as his eldest son inspired to slaughter every British soldier in sight for the death of a family member. As if that wasn't enough inspiration, Gibson's rampage is kicked into overdrive when his eldest son is also killed by the same damn British soldier.
    • Lethal Weapon 2. Riggs slaughters a bunch of dirty South African drug runners for drowning his love interest. The Dragon also reveals that he killed Riggs' wife years earlier, though he meant to kill Riggs.
  • Point Blank (1967), based on a novel by Richard Stark, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin. The film was the original inspiration for Payback. In fact, Gibson even used a large-frame Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver like the one Marvin used in the 1967 version. Of course, in that one, the amount of money Walker (Marvin) wanted was a lot smaller; inflation, you know.
  • The biker babe film Bury Me An Angel (1972) actually had the tagline "A howling hellcat humping a hot steel hog on a roaring rampage of revenge!" (which is probably where Tarantino got the line). Whether the film actually lives up to this tagline or not is another matter (one review suggests it doesn't).
  • Gregoire de Fronsac, protagonist of Brotherhood of the Wolf, goes on one of these when Mani is killed by gypsies. Fronsac proceeds to enter the gypsies' stronghold and kill all of them in an Unstoppable Rage - without saying a word.
  • The Darkman films are based around this trope, with the titular character returning to take revenge on the mobsters that very nearly killed him.
  • Max Payne had the titular character trying to avenge the death of his family at the hands of drug addicted felons. However, he doesn't go on an actual rampage until the last half hour, when he finds out the true identity of his family's killers.
  • Almost the entire plot of Quantum of Solace, since it focuses on James Bond's desire to bring Vesper's killers to justice. However, he does NOT kill the one who is the most responsible for it, thus either demonstrating that his objective was truly the movie title and not revenge, or simply that he handed down a Fate Worse Than Death.
  • After a career featuring many such movies, Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. When a gang of thugs harass Walt's (Eastwood) friend Thao and rape his sister Sue, the audience (and Thao) are expecting some Old Testament retribution, but instead, Walt, a war veteran who understands the trauma of taking a life, tricks the thugs into murdering him, thus getting them all sent to jail for murder.
  • In Get Carter, Michael Caine plays a vicious, sociopathic London gangster who investigates the suspicious death of his brother and turns his hometown into a bloodbath as he uncovers the truth.
  • The Steven Soderbergh film The Limey is an homage to this trope and Get Carter in particular, as an English ex-con seeks the truth behind his daughter's death in L.A., only to discover he and the culprit are Not So Different, leading him to stay his hand.
  • Subverted in, of all things, Repo the Genetic Opera. Nathan Wallace figures out Rotti's plan to take his daughter away and gets off to a great start, taking out several machine-gun-toting cops with only his scalpels, and then is promptly taken down by Luigi Largo and the henchgirls. This is about the point he realises that he is in deep shit (and Rotti got upgraded from Manipulative Bastard to Magnificent Bastard.
  • Such a rampage forms the basis of Fran çois Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), in which the titular bride systematically murders every one of the men who caused the death of the groom on her wedding day. Sound familiar?
  • Chingachgook goes on one of these in The Last of the Mohicans after Uncas is killed by Magua. He and Hawkeye plow through Magua's mooks, and Magua himself doesn't stand a chance against Papa Wolf.
  • The Rambo series is rife with this trope.
    • In First Blood, John Rambo spends the first half of the movie pursued by crooked cops and the National Guard. He spends this portion of the movie camping in the woods, far out of reach of his enemies and plotting to escape them. However, once they barricade him in a mine shaft and leave him for dead, he escapes, hijacks a truck and heads back into the town, where he takes out the entire main street with an M60.
    • In the sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, he starts out on a mission into a prison camp where he was held to rescue POWs. His partner on the mission is a Vietnamese woman named Co. Along the course of the journey they fall in love, and just after they decide to go back to America together as husband and wife she is brutally shot down. Rambo goes fucking insane. While in the first half he only killed what was necessary, after his love is killed he hunts down and brutalizes every mook he can get his knife in. His momento? A headband fashioned from her dress. An already personal mission is made even more personal, and he completes it after killing every single mook.
    • In the fourth installment he does this at the end of the film in a way that would have made Dr. Richard Gatling proud.
  • After Master Liu is killed in Ip Man, the titular pugilist goes on a short-lived one of these. He calls for ten judoka to fight and Curb Stomps the lot. Even the last one, who's clearly unwilling to fight on, goes down hard. After Ip Man's done, you can see him trembling slightly as he comes out of Tranquil Fury. You get the feeling that if he thought he had a chance he would have gone after the murderer himself. The Japanese fighters' apparent Mook Chivalry may be justifiable if you believe that martial artists can sense intent, as Ip Man's state of mind would have given him enough violent intent to make his opponents hesitant about bumrushing him.
  • In Rolling Vengeance, the drunken rednecks who work at the local brewery kill the hero's mother and sister, then put his father in the hospital by throwing a cinderblock off an overpass into the window of his rig, causing him to wreck. They get away with both crimes. The hero decides to convert his monster truck into a mobile death machine and slaughter them in some vehicular mayhem.
  • In She Devil, Roseanne Barr plays Ruth Patchett, a woman abandoned by her husband for a beautiful, wealthy, successful woman (played by Meryl Streep). Her response? To systematically destroy every part of his life bit by bit taking everything he has until he is left broken, alone, and in jail. Seriously, she has a to-do list. While she's at it, she adds a layer of delightful hell to the woman who he left her for as well in the process.
    • This is actually a remake of an older, British film called The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, which mostly runs on the same storyline. Believe it or not, the spurned wife in that tale actually goes to greater lengths, including becoming the nanny/mistress/submissive to the judge who will be the one to sentence her ex-husband to prison.
  • In Three Hundred, when the Captain's son gets beheaded by a charging Persian cavalryman, he literally cuts a complete swathe through the Persian assault to reach his son's corpse. The other Spartans drag him back behind their lines before he can get himself killed. It's something of a literal example, since his cries are said to terrify the Persian horde.
  • Navajo Joe. When a group of lowlife renegade cowboys kill and scalp his whole tribe, including his wife, let's just say it doesn't turn out very good for 'em.
  • Brad Pitt's character, Louis, in Interview with the Vampire goes on a doozy of one after Claudia is turned to ashes by Armand's vampires.
  • The 2010 Korean film I Saw the Devil is in some ways a deconstruction of the protagonists of these sort of films and their Pay Evil Unto Evil revenge plots. The Hero is a cop whose fiance is murdered by a sadistic serial killer. After discovering the identity of the killer, after brutally torturing three possible suspects who are ultimately innocent of the crime, he decides to make killer's life a living hell following him around beating him up, letting him go and then beating him up again later hoping to make the man suffer just as much as he has. This is all well and good except that along the way several innocent people are harmed because of the hero's refusal to just kill the villain and the killer ultimately snaps and proceeds to torture or kill the hero's loved ones. This in turn leads to the hero making sure the killer dies in front of his innocent parents and son which ultimately brings the hero absolutely no solace and arguably makes him as much of a monster as the villain.
  • Tank Girl. After DeeTee is killed, the other Rippers attack and slaughter large numbers of Water and Power troops.
  • In Law Abiding Citizen, Clyde Shelton's "people to be killed horribly" list includes the two guys who killed his wife and daughter. And their lawyer. And the judge from the trial. And the D.A. And most of the people in the D.A.'s office. And the Mayor, City Council, and police brass of Philadelphia.
  • Most of the plot to Goemon revolves around this, when the titular character plots to assassinate Hideyoshi. It becomes a very literal rampage of revenge when Hideyoshi boils his childhood friend Saizou, and his son, ALIVE, and he becomes the most epic One-Man Army in recent movie history. He then tops himself shortly after by fighting two armies by himself, taking out one with relative ease, and only stopping on the second after his former master slowed him down, as well as his decision to withdraw his killing blow on the general when he got his chance.
  • In Snatch, Complete Monster gangster Bricktop has secured Irish Traveler and bare-knuckle boxing champion Mickey's cooperation in a rigged fight by having his mother's caravan set on fire while she's still in it. It occurs to Mickey's allies that he appears to be cooperating rather mildly, under the circumstances... until the night of the fight. When it's revealed that as well as putting money on himself to win the fight and winning it, thus ripping Bricktop off completely, he and his fellow Travellers have arranged an ambush in which they bloodily wipe out pretty much all of Bricktop's organisation, including Bricktop himself. As Turkish notes: "For every action there's a reaction. And a pikey reaction is quite a fucking thing."
  • Chan-Wook Park's "Revenge Trilogy" does not share any plot or characters, but are all based on roaring rampages of revenge, ultimately displaying their futility.
    • Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance features two rampages colliding after a well-intentioned kidnapping results in tragedy.
    • Oldboy features a man trapped in a hotel room for 15 years, only to be released without explanation. As he starts his roaring rampage to uncover the culprit, he learns that his imprisonment was itself motivated by revenge.
    • Sympathy for Lady Vengeance features a woman who carefully orchestrates vengeance on a murderer who betrayed her and caused her to be imprisoned for a crime she did not commit.
  • Big Daddy in Kick Ass has turned his entire life (and that of his daughter's) into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. This is quite different in the graphic novel.
    • After Big Daddy is himself killed, Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass embark on their own Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Honorary mention goes to The Two Towers, where Ents begin their rampage with a BIG ROAR. And they are also going methodically: they destroy the walls, stomp the orcs and finally flood the whole thing while the walking trees finish off the orcs that went to Helm's Deep.
  • Gypsy and Helen tear through about 40-some-odd vampires in The Twins Effect, after Reeve is turned into a vampire and staked.
  • Solomon Kane in the movie goes on a pretty epic Roaring Rampage of Revenge about halfway through the movie after the kind family he was travelling with is brutally massacred by a pack of Malachi's bandits. Kane does not take this well. At all.
  • The Moorwen in Outlander wants to kill every Human Alien in the universe for the genocide of its species.
  • Wikus's Last Stand in District 9 fits this trope, when Wikus on the Prawn Mech goes berserker and fights back the MNU mercenaries, slaughtering all them, except the colonel, who gets very close to killing Wikus... only to be butchered and devoured alive by vengeful prawns.
  • The Bruce Lee movie, Fist Of Fury (aka The Chinese Connection) deconstructs revenge. Lee's character Chen Zhen returns home to Shanghai in the early 20th Century only to discover his martial arts teacher Huo Yuanjia has mysteriously died. He discovers a conspiracy involving the local Japanese power structure and a rival karate dojo. Chen gets mad, and goes out for revenge, but his rampage only escalates the violence, and then his whole family falls victim to it. Even though he kills the main villain, he's lost everything and ends up turning himself in.
  • In Harry Brown, Michael Caine's eponymous Harry and his best bud Lenny spend their time sitting in the pub, lamenting the fact that their neighbourhood has gotten so bad, especially given that Harry's wife has just died. After Lenny goes to confront the street gangs with a bayonet and winds up killed, Harry decides to take matters into his own hands with some not-quite-forgotten Royal Marine skills.
  • There are at least two film subgenres dedicated completely to this trope: exploitation revenge, and Rape and Revenge.
    • One of the classic examples of the former is Rolling Thunder, in which William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones play soldiers returning from Vietnam who hunt down the killers of Devane's character's family.
    • The most notorious example of the latter is I Spit on Your Grave, in which Camille Keaton's character exacts violent revenge on several men who brutally gang-raped her.
  • Eddie Lomax goes on one of these after three brothers shoot him and leave him for dead in the desert. Ends up taking out their entire gang, plus their rival gang.
  • In Short Circuit 2, Johnny Five goes for this after Big Bad Oscar and his goons beat Five to Hell and back.
  • Murphy's War (1971). The title character is the Sole Survivor after a U-Boat sinks his ship and machine-guns the lifeboats. He becomes obsessed with trying to destroy the U-boat which is resting up in a nearby river, first teaching himself to fly a floatplace and trying to bomb it with improvised firebombs, then trying to ram it with a floating crane even though Germany has already surrendered. Murphy is eventually able to destroy the vessel, but gets trapped and dies himself in the process.
  • The titular character of The Iron Giant drops his Gentle Giant persona and goes on a gun filled, very pissed off rampage against the Army when it looks like they killed his friend Hogarth.
  • In The Boondock Saints II: All Saint's Day, the MacManus brothers have been living peacefully in Ireland for several years, until words reaches them that their old priest in Boston has been murdered by a gangster trying to goad them out of hiding. Their response? "Every last motherfucker who had anything to do with it is going to die."
  • Subverted in Léon: The Professional. Matilda has trained with the hitman Leon. By chance, she learns of where the people she wants her revenge on work. She arms herself, sneaks in successfully, hunts down Stansfield in the bathroom, and is promptly caught and very nearly shot dead by the same.
  • X Men First Class features much Ho Yay between Erik and Charles including Erik cradling Charles's injured body and trying to kill the person responsible.
    • Not to mention Erik's roaring rampage of revenge against the man who killed his mother while they were prisoners in the Nazi camps.
  • Loki in The Avengers, driven by jealousy of his brother Thor, decides to subjugate the entire population of Earth. In doing so, he establishes himself as the Big Bad and pisses off a lot of heroes.
  • Ralphie in a A Christmas Story goes on one on the neighborhood bully Scut Farkus after having enough of his treatment of him. He beats him up while crying and unleashing a stream of profanities.
  • In Posse, Jesse Lee carves a bloody path across the west, hunting down the men who killed his father.


Literature

  • In Belisarius Series this is done all the time to the bad guys and usually deserved most splendidly.
    • One enemy secret agent who wishes to sweeten a deal during negotiations and also apparently believes Even Evil Has Standards mails to a councilor in a good-guy empire, the hands of the pimp that had enslaved his daughters as a favor.
  • In The First Law spin-off book Best Served Cold, the main character Monzcarro Murcatto gets...a tad carried away. One of the people on the list she literally smashes their head in with her bare hands.
  • Also calm is Kirth Gersen, the protagonist of the The Demon Princes series by Jack Vance, who was raised by his grandfather to have no Goal in Life other than to find and kill the five so-called Demon Princes, pirates and criminal masterminds who were responsible for the destruction of the colony world from which Kirth and his grandfather were the sole survivors. The ending has Kirth lapsing into bleak, bleak depression upon the death of his last target - raised his entire life for only one purpose, now that he's completed it he has no purpose at all.
    • Except Alice Wroke.*
  • Harry Dresden. He has that surname for a reason, and god help you if you have taken his daughter/hurt his friends. You will not survive the experience.
    • Charity and Michael Carpenter both have these on different occasions. Both when one of their daughters is kidnapped.
  • Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy is an excellent example of this trope. Vindice (his name literally means Revenge) throws himself into his role as bloody revenger with glee.
  • In the quote above from The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling, a British officer rather gruesomely threatens a border raider that the British army will do this to his tribe if he is murdered during a parley.
  • Kahlan's Con Dar (Blood Rage), in which she gains the power to throw lightning bolts in addition to her normal domination power and can only be used to defend or avenge Richard, definitely qualifies.
    • In the end of the second book, Richard had a rampage of his own. And long before that, Zedd had his rampage during the D'Hara/Midlands war when his wife was killed; one so bad both sides were scared shitless of him.
  • In the Star Trek novel Vendetta, Delcara mixes it up with the 1701-D crew because she wants revenge on The Borg, and her weapon of choice will take out a lot of innocents along the way.
  • Takeshi Kovacs is prone to these:
    • 'In Woken Furies, his former girlfriend falls afoul of a patriarchal cult who remove her cortical stack, eventually resulting in her Final Death. When he finds out, he goes to the village and kills every single person who was an adult at the time, in his words, "Every single person who could have done something and instead chose to not." Then he goes on a global crusade, killing every single priest of the religion, cutting their neocortical recorder stacks out, downloading their minds into swamp panthers, and forcing them to fight to the death over and over again. When we meet him, it's implied that he's been doing it for several years.
      • When asked at what point he's planning to stop, he says something along the lines of "they can't give her back to me, so why should I stop?"
    • In Altered Carbon he returns to a shady medical lab where he had been loaded into a virtual reality and tortured over the course of several subjective days. He kills the pimp who sold him out, everyone who worked at the brothel the pimp ran, and everyone at the medical lab, sparing only the boss's stack for later "interrogation."
    • In Broken Angels he ends up killing each and every single member of the mercenary company he was working with, even though he was severely injured and a few days away from death by radiation poisoning.
  • William Shakespeare's Hamlet, naturally. Granted, his hit list only has one name on it, but he very quickly demonstrates that he doesn't mind knocking off a bystander or two to get to him, and the body count simply becomes heinous by the end of the play.
  • The eponymous character of The Adventures of Samurai Cat books, Miaowara Tomokato, is on this kind of journey to kill the men who murdered his master. In the process, he runs amok through parodies of just about everything, including Disneyland, Star Wars, and others.
  • A more tragic example is the title character of the poem The Highwayman. It doesn't go so well, as he's immediately gunned down by King George's soldiers.
    • The horrifying irony being that she'd shot herself (they'd tied her up with a musket to her breast and her hands tied - she works at the ropes until she can get the tip of a finger onto the trigger) to warn him off and save him in the first place.
  • In the 12th century German epic Nibelungenlied, Kriemhild's husband Siegfried is murdered by Hagen at the behest of her brother's wife, which is condoned by her three brothers. A few years later she marries King Etzel the Hun, which provides her with the necessary muscle for revenge, and about ten years later she invites her brothers, Hagen and the other retainers to her new place. However the brothers were fought back like madmen all night, resulting in a seven chapter long bloodbath. At the same time, Kriemhild turns into a complete psycho, sending more and more men into the hall and ordering the feasting hall to be burned down, and finally has her revenge as she decapitates her husband's killer personally. By the end, Etzel (who is based on Attila the Hun, no less) is completely terrified of her.
  • Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan seems to have trouble keeping innocent bystanders alive, but since he's like the black ops version of The Punisher (and in fact was the inspiration for the original Punisher) he is pretty much on a Roaring Marathon.
  • Redwall has a good few: Grath Longfletch, Lonna Bowstripe, Orlando the Axe, and Gorath the Flame.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel Only In Death, Eszrah goes on one. Believing himself dishonored by living after Gaunt's death, he does the only thing he can—a rampage in which he kills as many as he can with Gaunt's sword before he dies. That is, until he finds Gaunt alive.
  • In Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan goes on one of these after his home is burned down by invading German troops, and, as he believes, his wife Jane is killed.
  • The entire premise of David Weber's In Fury Born. Having one of the Ancient Greek Furies involved is usually a fair indicator.
  • Drizzt Do'Urden in the Hunter's Blades Trilogy, in his Sociopathic Hero alternate personality The Hunter.
  • David Valentine of The Vampire Earth series has a few. When his love interest in the first book gets kidnapped, he butchers the man who did it and his bodyguard, then proceeds to head into one of the most dangerous cities in the world. He gets the girl out, too, taking quite a few people (and Reapers). In fact, the entire series seems to be mini-Roaring Rampages of Revenge focused on an individual level contained within the papa-daddy of them all, his goal of exterminating every fucking vampire on Earth.
  • Sam Vimes in Thud has a bit of a delayed one after some dwarves threaten his son. (They tried to threaten his wife. She was with her dragons. It didn't end well -- for the dwarves, that is.) Near the end of the book he slaughters quite a few of them, and barely stops himself (with some help) from killing their leaders so that he could ARREST them. Which just makes him that much more badass.
  • Daine from the Immortals series by Tamora Pierce does the whole roaring rampage of revenge thing, taking down an entire city in the process. With an army of zombie dinosaurs.
  • The Wheel of Time series has lots of these.
    • The first book when Lews Therin takes revenge on himself for killing his entire family when he was insane by drawing on the Power until he eventually kills himself and reshapes the earth he's standing on for miles.
    • The second is after Aviendha's temporary death in The Fires of Heaven--Rand sees her body and proceeds to rip open a path to the World of Dreams, kill anything in his path without care for who or what they are, and when he finally finds Rahvin, the man responsible for Aviendha's death, uses balefire, a technique not even used by the Forsaken, to erase him from the pattern and turn back time, remarking that he doesn't care if he's unraveled the world as long as Aviendha is alive. Yeah, you don't mess with Rand's girls.
    • There's also the incident of Egwene being captured by the Seanchan, who take control of her power and spend several months training her to be a weapon and attempting to break her will. When she finally regains free access to her own power it turns out the training to be a weapon thing was pretty successful but the breaking her will thing has thus far only instilled her with a frantic, almost mindless fear and hatred of the Seanchan.
  • In all versions of Carrie, the telekinetic title character engages in this trope after a horrific prank at her prom ruins the happiest moment of her torturous life and kills her date, culminating in setting the gym on fire and leaving everyone inside to burn alive. And it doesn't end there, either. In the book and the remake film, she levels most of the town, too.
  • In Field of Dishonor resident Action Girl Honor Harrington goes on a brief rampage after her boyfriend is essentially legally murdered (tricked into a duel by a professional shootist) by challenging each person responsible to a duel and gunning them down. Additionally, in In Enemy Hands she goes on sort of a pre-Roaring Rampage when Ransom orders Nimitz to be killed attempting to take down as many soldiers as possible before she's beaten down.
  • In A Song of Ice and Fire, Arya Stark eventually develops a to-kill list when bit by little bit, her father is murdered in front of her, friends killed and/or tortured and beaten bloody time and time again as a servant in Harrendal, and has already managed to fill a portion of her kill quota. The worst part? She's nine.
    • Catelyn Stark after her resurrection. Spending nearly three books losing everything and everyone she held dear, culminating in watching her son get slaughtered in front of her would probably make anyone a vengeance crazy mad lady regardless of zombiefication.
  • In The Drawing Of The Three, book 2 of The Dark Tower series, Eddie Dean goes utterly insane and dispatches several nasties with Roland's gun. Naked, no less.
  • In Chris Roberson's Warhammer 40,000 Imperial Fists novel Sons of Dorn, Captain Taelos wants to atone for his failure by a "Warrior's Pilgrimage." He is refused the honor (for now) and sent to collect aspirants. At the end, he adds the dead from his last mission to his tally to atone for, subtracts those whose lives he has saved, and feels honored by the duty of collecting aspirants.
  • In Twilight, we find out that Rosalie's record is almost as clean as Carlisle's. She went on one of these after being turned into a vampire, against the guys who raped and murdered her in the first place. Among them was her fiance, whom she saved for last, and then wore a wedding dress to kill. Especially considering her normal characterization, generally cited as her Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • In The Running Man Ben, after discovering the The Games Company had his wife murdered, destroys their primary government building. Killing the higher ups of the company. And everyone inside. And everyone within a large radius. (Its stated debris was falling 20 blocks out, not to mention most things in the novel are nuclear powered and the dust clouds of 9/11 blasted quite far.)
  • Tarma from Mercedes Lackey's Vows and Honor series (part of the Heralds of Valdemar world), is the last survivor of Clan Tale'sedrin after bandits ambushed them while they celebrated. Her entire family, including the man she loved, is dead. She has been gang-raped and left for dead. What, then, does she do? She declares blood feud against the bandits, an act which is one of the most drastic possible for one of the Shin'a'in (it requires her to swear herself as one of her Goddess's servants and a Celibate Heroine, for a start). Then she rides to a town that the bandits have taken over as their base, and kills them all, one by one.
    • Herald Vanyel in Magic's Price, also by Mercedes Lackey, gets kidnapped, tortured, and raped after having been given a drug that not only blocks his formidable magic but also messes with his physical coordination so that he can't even defend himself using his equally formidable fighting skills. His captors are under strict orders to keep him alive, and when they realize that they've gone to far and he's about to die, they bring in a healer, whose remedy is the antidote to the drug. As soon as the drug wears off. . . . BOOM!
  • Invoked in the Halo Expanded Universe, where the SPARTAN-IIIs are recruited from children who have lost much due to the Covenant attacks and wish to get back at the aliens.
  • Harry Potter did this when he went after Bellatrix for killing Sirius. He even tried to cast a Cruciatus Curse on her.
    • Sirius himself did this before the series' beginning, when he went after Peter Pettigrew, who betrayed Sirius' best friend James Potter to Voldemort and caused his death.
  • In the Magic the Gathering novel Prophecy, Barrin goes on one (that also turns the big showdown into a complete Curb Stomp Battle) after his wife is murdered and mutilated by a psychotic enemy mage. His rampage single-handedly wins the war against the Keldons, which raises the question of why he didn't employ those kinds of tactics to begin with.
  • In the Stephen King collection, Full Dark No Stars, one of the short stories, Big Driver, is about Tess, a rape victim who goes on a rampage against those who harmed her.
  • In the fantasy novel The Conjurer Princess, the title character sets off on one of these after her family is slaughtered at the wedding of her elder sister and her fiance who she loves, with the sole exception of her elder sister who was carried off. By the end, though, she finds out that her elder sister was in on it and the Big Bad actually her real lover...
  • Tom Clancy's novel Without Remorse is a prequel showing how John Clark got to be the Badass that he is in the present day novels. After his girlfriend, a recovering prostitute/drug addict, is killed by the pushers she once worked for, he begins picking them off one by one, Punisher-style, but not before torturing them to find out more information about their gang.
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora gives us the Gray King, whose family was killed by the other nobles of Camorr because they wouldn't go along with the Secret Peace with the city's criminal elements, headed by Capa Barsavi. So when he returns to town, he starts killing the heads of every gang that works for Barsavi, drowns his daughter in a barrel of horse urine, sets up Barsavi's best thief as a fall guy, and, when the Gray King is believed dead, kills him (with a magically-controlled shark) and his sons at the party. And this is all a lead-up to his revenge on the nobles, which would involve magically lobotomizing all of them and their children.
  • Sandman Slim is basically the old story of "hitter from the outfit gets sent up, goes upstate, gets out, seeks revenge on the bastards who turned him in." Only substitute "hitter" for "sorcerer," the outfit for "his cabal," and "upstate" for "Hell."
  • In Papillon, three convicts come up with a stupid revenge plot, which Papillon refuses to take place in. Having arranged a revolt, they plan to raid the armory and kill every non-prisoner on the island, the families of the guards included. Papillon points out that escape is impossible as there is only boat capacity for forty, a hundred armed men wanting that space, and the massacre will turn all neighboring countries against sheltering them. They don't care as all they want is their bloody revenge and only want to escape to the mainland to go guerrilla against the prison authority. In the end the heads of the revolt are shipped to another island and attempt the uprising on their own, nobody else joins in and their revenge ends with their deaths.
  • In the last book of the third Warrior Cats series, Hollyleaf freaks out at learning her true parentage and exposes her mother's greatest secret. Then, she attempts to kill her mother, before running away into some tunnels.
    • Also, Ashfur, although some would call his attempts at revenge on Squirrelflight a Disproportionate Retribution rather than this trope.
  • The Most Extreme Crueltie and Revenge of Shylock of Venice is a book which all but admits to being a Revenge Fic sequel to The Merchant of Venice. Shylock makes a Deal with the Devil (who turns out to be an Author Avatar), wrecks Venice, kills a whole bunch of characters (ending with Antonio), then has an attack of My God, What Have I Done? and reverses time so that he can chose a death sentence at the end of the court scene.
  • Silk goes on one of these in King of the Murgos when a prostitute he was quite friendly with is murdered. He calmly and methodically kills a dozen members of the family responsible in cold blood - even taking the time to make the first few deaths look like accidents - and shows absolutely no remorse when later questioned about it.
  • Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Played with. The Vigilantes obey a Thou Shalt Not Kill code. However, they will give the sucker a Fate Worse Than Death. The first seven books have each of the 7 members strike back against the people who wronged them without getting caught. Also, they wait very patiently for a few months to a year before striking each target.
  • There's a mass-combat version in Return of the King, when the army of Rohan rallies behind Eomer son of Eomund to avenge Theoden and Eowyn on the Pelennor Fields.

Over the field rang his clear voice calling "Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world's ending!" And with that the host began to move. But the Rohirrim sang no more. Death they cried with one voice loud and terrible, and gathering speed like a great tide their battle swept about their fallen king and passed, roaring away southwards.


Live Action TV

  • In Being Human (UK), Mitchell goes on one when he finds out Lucy tried to kill him and successfully killed of most of his clan.
  • The Wire does this twice, both times with Omar—the usual culprit behind the few over-the-top tropes in the series. The first time is played straight, with Omar shaking up the entire Barksdale organization as revenge for the murder of his boyfriend, with Avon Barksdale himself narrowly escaping by luck alone. The second time can be seen as a subversion, as the audience goes into the season expecting Omar to work his usual magic on the people who killed his friend, but he ends up failing miserably and dying in a spectacularly pointless and meaningless fashion.
  • In Lost's flashforwards, Ben Linus appears to be on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge (with Sayid's help) avenging Alex and Nadia. Ben even has a list.
    • He stops short of killing Penny Widmore when he sees her toddler son with her. And when Desmond kicks his ass.
    • Ilana goes on one on Ben after she learned that Ben killed Jacob. She stops after Ben explained why he did so.
  • Merlin Uther, after the death of Ygraine.
  • Twenty Four: Jack's daughter escapes, and the villains still want to lure Jack in, so they have The Mole tell him that his daughter's body had been found. Seriously. Bad. Idea. Jack comes in, all right -- both guns blazing—and doesn't leave a single one alive, including the (surrendering) Big Bad. We all know about the Mama Bear, but don't mess with a Papa Wolf, either. Especially not one that's having the longest day of his life (well, one of the several longest days of his life, anyway).
    • Still, Jack can't hold a candle to Tony in season seven, avenging the murder of his wife and unborn son.
    • But in Tony's case, it was more of a traditional Revenge plot—he never went on a "rampage" since all his crimes were only meant to maintain his cover long enough to gain an audience with the villain.
    • Jack brings this back with a vengeance in Season 8 after Renee is killed. The villains actually lampshade this, recognizing that he is not trying to expose them, he just wants to kill them all. One of them actually states that they wouldn't be in this mess if they hadn't murdered Renee.
  • The Babylon 5 universe contains at least four rampages of revenge.
    • The Earth-Minbari War was more or less this trope turned Up to Eleven: the Minbari had a Gotta Kill Them All rampage (on the scale of a major and horrific interstellar war!) against Earthforce for killing the Minbari leader. ('No Mercy')
    • Delenn's Tranquil Fury annihilation of a Drakh's fleet and a colony ship, prompted after the Drakh destroyed several civilian ships and a White Star. ('End This')
    • Ivanova's 'God Sent Me' Unstoppable Rage against Earthforce for capturing Sheridan.
    • In Crusade, the Drakh's attack against Earth in retaliation (?) for the retreat of the Shadows.
  • In Rome Vorenus and Pullo go on one of these when Vorenus thinks his children have been killed. A very, very, very short rampage, because Pullo and Vorenus are There Is No Kill Like Overkill personified.
    • Not to forget what Vorenus does to the slavers when he discovers that they are alive and were sold to them. This most glorious of Roaring Rampages was magnificently topped off with a man-tears approved moment when Vorenus embraces the illegitimate son of his dearly departed wife and her adulterer.
  • iCarly: Sam in "iMake Sam Girlier", and Gibby in "iPsycho".
  • In Battlestar Galactica, Laura Roslin very nearly has one of these after Tom Zarek tells her Admiral Adama has been killed (he hasn't) and she should surrender.

"No. Not now, not ever, do you hear me? I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eyeteeth to END YOU! I swear it! I'M COMING FOR ALL OF YOU!"

    • The best part of that entire sequence was Adama's "oh shit oh shit gotta call off my girlfriend now oh shit" face after he took back CIC.
  • Heroes: Matt Parkman seeks revenge against Danko for murdering his girlfriend, Daphne Millbrook. Parkman does so by telepathically forcing Danko to divulge his true identity and the fact that he kills for a living to his unsuspecting girlfriend, Alena. Parkman then points his gun at Alena, but cannot bring himself to shoot her.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Dark Willow.

Willow: (To Glory) "I...Owe...YOU...PAIN!!!"

    • Giles got a less successful, but no less awesome, cold-rampage After Angel murdered Jenny Calender. FLAMING BASEBALL BAT!
      • "Don't you people use stakes anymore?!"
  • Isabelle Tyler from The 4400 goes batshit insane and kills every member of the NOVA Group she can find because Daniel Armand gave Shawn schizophrenia.
  • In Forever Knight, a child vampire shows up and starts slaughtering those in LaCroix's inner circle. Urs and Vachon bite the dust, with Nick next on the list, before we find out that she's actually LaCroix's mortal daughter from when he was a Roman named Lucius; she was saved from death by being turned into a vampire, and she then turned LaCroix into a vampire so that he could survive the destruction of Pompeii. He nearly killed her and sealed her remains in a tomb, but she survived and is looking to pay him back for his betrayal. Check out the series page for the full story.
  • In the third season summer finale of Burn Notice, Strickler sells out Fiona to Irish terrorists to get Michael back into the FBI's good graces. After a lengthy Hannibal Lecture about how Fiona is weighing him down, nothing about this is clean, and how he's got to stop living in the past, Michael grits out "Fiona is not my past" and shoots Strickler in the chest. He and Sam then go in guns blazing and save Fiona.
  • Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs. In the second season finale of NCIS, Agent Catelin Todd is murdered by turncoat Mossad agent Ari Haswari. Even though he was intending to track down and kill Ari before this for his previous actions, Gibbs loses it and goes after him full-bore in the two-part third season opener.
    • If that counts then him killing the man who killed his first wife and child has to count as well.
  • In the fourth season of Las Vegas, Ed Deline's daughter Delinda is kidnapped and held for ransom by a Smug Snake calling himself "Mr. Chips"(you know, since Ed runs a casino, and casinos gamble with chips...). Ed pays the ransom in exchange for Delinda's release, but Chips doublecrosses and nearly kills Ed, making Ed very cranky. Oh, by they way, Ed used to be the CIA's head of counter-intelligence, and his right hand man Danny McCoy, Delinda's boyfriend, is a decorated Marine Lieutenant with two bad tours of duty in Iraq under his belt. Suffice to say that Chips and his men don't get a chance to regret their duplicity.
  • Any fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation remember who the Husnock are? Or should I say, were? Killing a man's wife is bad, especially if said man has power rivaling one of the Q.
    • To put this in perspective, the Husnock that the energy being (who often took on a human form out of convenience) killed off numbered fifty billion at the time.
  • In CSI: Miami, the Mala Noche gang is stupid enough to snipe Marisol, Horatio's wife. Horatio tracks them to Brazil and murders her killer in cold blood. Don't mess with Horatio Caine - or anyone he loves.
    • The Mala Noches confirmed their "too stupid to live" bonafides when they decided to make Caine's execution "look good" by handing him a loaded pistol. (See "Matthew Quigley".)
    • Memmo, one of the Mala Noches who killed Horatio's wife later escaped from prison and went on a deadly rampage not against Horatio & Co. but the people who put his daughter in harm's way, from the nurses who turned her away from the hospital to the head of the foster-care placement system who left her with a neglectful woman. This guy's actions were so Egregious that Horatio basically lets Memmo kill him.
  • Two of the villains in Boss. One uses very elaborate methods, while the other sticks to guns.
  • In the sixth season finale of Greys Anatomy, Gary Clarke, who blames Derek and Little Grey for the death of his wife, goes on a shooting rampage through the hospital. He has a list, too.
  • Used in a number of Criminal Minds episodes, and always portrayed in a realistically horrifying way. The most obvious examples are "True Night" (psychotic comic book artist runs around killing the street gang who murdered his pregnant fiancee in front of him, "Elephant's Memory" (perennially abused teenager snaps and sets out to kill everyone who's ever wronged him), "House On Fire" (man tries to avenge himself on an entire community for complicity in beating and driving him out of town by trapping them in burning buildings), and "Devil's Night" (man burns people alive after his life collapses after a fiery crash that left him in a coma and burned half his face off. Among his kills are the ex-con who hit him, the ex-landlord who kicked him out of his home and the ex-boss who fired him, and other people he felt slighted him just by having happy lives. His rampage would've culminated in the death of his ex-girlfriend and her family, if not for the discovery that his ex-girlfriend had had his child and the kid isn't afraid of his face ).
  • The Offender episode of Cold Case has the child victim's father on this path, which is understandable given that the real culprit killed his kid and framed him for it, leaving him incarcerated for 2 decades.
  • In The X-Files, Scully of all people has one of these in the episode "Beyond the Sea", when Mulder is seriously injured after following the information of a psychic on death row (a guy he earlier helped put in jail). Scully goes to said psychic and screams at him that if Mulder dies, she will personally throw the switch on him. See also Precision F-Strike.
    • She also has one later in the series, yelling at and nearly shooting the man who shot her sister. Scully doesn't often get mad, but when she does, it's best to stay out of her way.
    • She has one during the beginning of season 7 and the beginning of season 8, both involving Mulder being in danger.
  • In the Season 10 episode "Talion" of Stargate SG-1, Teal'c goes on one after a former foe bombs a free Jaffa summit, killing "many innocent Jaffa". First he uses the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique to track down those responsible for the bombing, and then when he found out who the mastermind was he had to put down SG-1 (which he does in curb stomp fashion) and then defeated the architect of the bombing in melee combat after being wounded with staff weapons and having the holy hell beaten out of him.
  • Beecher of Oz tries to go on one following seeing Keller, the guy he fell in love with, working with Schillinger his enemy but in a tragic Hope Spot fails and ultimately gets his arms and legs broken by Schillinger and Keller. Beecher and Schillinger frequently seek revenge against each other throughout the series. Then there's Beecher's epic revenge against Schillinger in episode eight.
  • In season one, episode three of The Borgias, Cesare promises Lucrezia that, should her husband prove ungallant, Cesare will cut his heart out with a dinner knife and serve it to her. Her husband, Giovanni Sforza, proves very ungallant. The rest of the season passes. Lucrezia's marriage is annulled. We think Cesare's just gonna let it pass. In the episode "The Choice" he essentially rips Sforza open from waistline to chest, carving him up like a Thanksgiving turkey. He can't find a heart, apparently, but he does give Lucrezis the knife.


Music

  • The Swiss-German Neue Deutsche Härte band, Metallspürhunde, has a song called 'Aus Dem Schatten' which is about a guy who has a long list of enemies who have made him feel alienated. And now he's going to pick them off one by one.
  • Doctor Steel's Lament for a Toy Factory.
  • The Promise by Dutch symphonic metal band Within Temptation. A woman's lover/husband is murdered, so she takes it upon herself to hunt down and kill everybody involved in his death. One particular line gives me a chill every time I hear it: "I'll make them bleed down at my feet."
    • This reminds me of another symphonic-metal track by Angtoria. The song in question, Six Feet Under, while not necessarily implying a R Ro R itself, certainly implies the singer might want one and is likely the sentiment accompanying or driving many of the R Ro Rs listed on this page. Whoever is the intended recipient of the lyrics "I'll dance on your grave until my feet bleed, six feet under's where you'll rot," followed by "We'll spit on your grave until your soul screams, six feet under's not deep enough" is quite likely deserving of a R Ro R, at least in the songwriter's eyes.
  • Chevelle's The Red. It's not completely clear, but it certainly sounds like it. For your estimation:

They said 'Freak', when you're singled out / The Red / Well it filters through/ So lay down, the threat is real / When his sight goes red again.

    • It's telling you to get out of the way when he gets angry! It sounds really clear to me!
  • Am I Evil? is the bloody revenge driven epic by Diamond Head, memorably covered by Metallica. After the burning of the main character's mother as a witch, he goes on a quest to brutally murder and torture everyone he can that was involved. And even very early on he understands that in doing so he has become the very type of monster that he is hunting. Eventually he succeeds but loses himself in the process.
  • The fifth song on The Protomen's original CD "Vengeance" is basically where Megaman heads on a beeline for Wily's fortress and tears through virtually every robot there on his very own Roaring Rampage of Revenge for Wily having killed his brother before him, Protoman. Actually it turns out Protoman was reconstructed by Wily later and turned evil. Uhm, woah.

Send me the best you've got/Send me your strongest machine
The fight my brother fought/Here, now, will end with me
Is this the best you've got?/Is this your strongest machine?
Now with one powershot/You'll see what vengeance means

    • A better example would be:

All you wounded!
And those of you who can!
Hurry back, tell your leader!
YOU'LL NEED MORE MEN!

  • Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' song "Crow Jane" (not much connection to the Skip James song of the same name) is about a woman who gets gang-raped by a bunch of miners from the local town. So she stocks up on guns and kills them all.
  • Um, "Iron Man"....
  • Manowar's "Dark Avenger" is about a character whose unjust suffering has been noted by the gods, so he is sent back from Hades to Kill'Em All.
  • "Strength of the World" by Avenged Sevenfold:

Avenge the dead killed all who crossed me in my path
Suicidal, I never planned on coming back
I want it, I need it, revenge is dripping from my teeth
Need nothing, to feel power, and bring the killers to their knees
Nothing to lose vengeance to gain (you know I'll never be the same)
So taste my breath I'm close behind you (so desperate on your final day)

Mythology

  • Pissing off Heracles was unfortunately very easy to do, and never a good idea. Among his many other deeds, Heracles is known for exacting horrific revenges on a number of Greek kings who crossed him. Whether it was King Augeas refusing to pay the cattle he owed Heracles for his cleaning out Augeas's stables, King Neleus refusing to purify Heracles after he killed a man in anger, or King Laomedon trying to get out of paying Heracles the magical horses he owed Heracles for killing the monster that threatened his kingdom, all three of them were eventually invaded by Heracles and his army and slaughtered for crossing him.
  • In The Iliad, Achilles gets into a spat with Agamemnon and decides that he won't be in a fighting mood for the foreseeable future. When his best buddy Patroclus gets himself killed trying to take Achilles' place, however, Achilles flips right the hell out and nearly chokes the Trojan river with their dead. Even Hector, the killer of Patroclus and first among the Trojans, makes a run for it until he realizes that Achilles won't stop chasing him and decides to go out swinging.
  • In The Odyssey Odysseus and his son kill all forty suitors who have dishonored their house. In the middle of the slaughter, some of the suitors try to repent and beg for mercy, but Odysseus affirms that he must kill all of them. The gods themselves demand that he take vengeance.


Professional Wrestling

  • In one memorable episode of WWF Monday Night Raw, Stone Cold Steve Austin used guerrilla tactics to eliminate the members of Vince McMahon's goon squad, one at a time. He eventually trapped Vince himself in the ring, threatening his boss' life with a gun before revealing it to be a prop, as when he "fired" it, a flag popped out reading, "Bang! 3:16". This didn't stop Vince from completely wetting his pants, however.
  • Randy Orton has punted Vince McMahon and Shane McMahon. He's DDT'd Stephanie McMahon and then kissed her in front of her husband. So what does said husband Triple H do? Grabs his sledgehammer and goes on a rampage that is still going on today.
    • Randy Orton (along with then-tag-team partner Edge) was also the victim of a Shawn Michaels RROR. Orton and Edge, along with an inopportune quad tear have taken out Triple H, and they're not exactly shy in telling everyone so. Shawn pulls Hunter's sledgehammer out from under the ring and proceeds to kick the everloving hell out of them.
  • John Cena succeeded in taking part in one against The Nexus for cheating him into being their slave and then Nexus leader Wade Barrett treating him horribly and forcing him into choosing between losing his career or ruling a match in Barrett's favor so he would become champion and be free. He chose to lose his career, ironically making him free to make Nexus' existence a living Hell. Subsequent weeks had Cena attacking Nexus members at random, eventually forcing Barrett to make a match between the two at WWE TLC. The match ended with Cena completing his mission as he handily beat Barrett.


Tabletop Games

  • Rather common in BattleTech. When an invading nation, Clan Smoke Jaguar used orbital bombardment on a conquered city, then killed anyone escaping, as a warning to all other conquered planets, every military in the Inner Sphere sent their best units and the extremely rare space warships on a mission to wipe out the entirety of the Clan Smoke Jaguar military, killing or capturing every single Jaguar warrior. They landed all their forces on the Jaguar homeworld, Huntress, then used their own orbital bombardment to wipe out concentrated Jaguar military forces while picking off stranglers with overwhelming firepower and ambush tactics.


Video Games

  • In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, if the player is trying to achieve the good ending, Leanna appears to be killed by the Necromancer Arantir, when the player arrives at his lair later the guards almost seem afraid of the players wrath as he becomes an unstoppable juggernaught of revenge, the player can then rescue her from the lair to get the good ending.
  • In Assassin's Creed: Revelations, after Ezio finds Yusef killed by the Templar's, he and an entire army of Assassins go through a Templar base and literally slaughter and defeat all the guards and Templar's. And when Ezio finds Prince Ahmet...
  • Ace Combat 5 The Unsung War gives us a 3 person variant when the enemy forces finally manage to kill off Chopper. The enemy pilots get to savour a few seconds of relieved cheering mainly along the lines of "see, they're not invincible after all!"... At which point you and the rest of the squadron proceed to completely destroy EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE AREA as payback. By the time the mission's over, the few surviving opponents are almost literally running away crying for their mommies.
  • Reivier Wirt of Quintessence - The Blighted Venom goes on a killing rampage after his wife supposedly dies. Complete with Hidden Eyes.
  • The title character of Max Payne also goes on one of these after his partner, Alex Balder is killed and he is framed for it. He starts with Jack Lupino, the guy he considers responsible, moves on to Lupino's boss, Punchinello, and then sets his sights on Nicole Horne when it's discovered that she was behind not only Alex's murder and the frame up (pulled off by dirty cop and Dragon B.B.), but also the murder of Max's wife and baby girl by V-head junkies three years ago.
    • And Max Payne 2 picks up before he starts his rampage. It isn't until the 3rd and final chapter of the game that he goes from reactionary, self-defense killing to actively hunting down those who wronged him. And everybody dies.
      • The third game continues the theme: Max is hired as a private bodyguard in South America. When his charge is kidnapped despite his best efforts, Max is told that he can't go up against the criminal cartel, there's too many of them and they have too much power. Max gears up anyway.
  • After beating the main story in Dissidia Final Fantasy, you can select SNK boss Chaos in quick battles, set him to level one, and then select a level 100 character. Proceed to curbstomps for every last retry you were forced to endure in story mode.
  • Despite the fact that he is probably one of the most reprehensible villains in video game history, Luca Blight from Suikoden II arguably could use this as justification for his actions.
    • Works for me; it's the only humanizing quality about what would otherwise be an almost cartoonishly evil villain.
  • After his wife, his son, and his king (along with almost everyone else in Doma castle) are killed by Kefka's poison, Cyan of Final Fantasy VI rampages through the Imperial camp. Partly subverted in that Sabin and Shadow come to Cyan's aid and the three end up escaping from the camp.
  • Delita's reaction to his sister's murder in Final Fantasy Tactics.
    • It is to be noted while he acts that way towards the immediate person who dealt the killing blow, his revenge on the corrupt society behind the killing was much more... planned.
      • Argath has a less subtle version which crosses the Moral Event Horizon. After being resurrected by the Lucavi, he loudly declares to Ramza that he's going to kill all of the lower class, presumably in part to get back at Delita for killing him.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth learns the "truth" that he's a descendent of the ancients, then goes berserk & burns down the town of Nibelheim. He later learns the truth behind the "truth," but continues with his plan to become a God, transferring "descendent of the Ancients" to "descendent of Jenova." A good deal of his actions—which also become his downfall—are also that he wants to get revenge on Cloud for defeating him in a fairly humiliating fashion.
  • Although he remains chillingly calm about it, the remake of Ninja Gaiden is all about Ryu Hayabusa putting his blade through the many minions of the Vigoor Empire that razed his village and killed off almost all of his kin.
    • Most of whom die because they're in the way.
  • In Super Robot Wars, after finding out that the Fury basically obliterated everything near her in the beginning of the series, Calvina Coulange in Super Robot Wars Judgment fell into this trope, intensely hating every Furies she came across and mercilessly slaughtering all Furies that come across her, but she didn't do it with a roar. She later made one exception, though.
    • Also, Fallen Hero Tempest, whose family were killed by the EFA screwing up, and who has joined the Divine Crusaders not to protect the world from aliens or build an empire, but simply to hurt the EFA. As it happens, he doesn't give a damn about the "list", attempting to kill a fourteen-year-old girl despite noting that she was the same age as his daughter would have been.
  • The vampire Raziel is brutally mutilated, rebuked, and tossed into oblivion in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver... but that's just how the story starts. Once he gets back up, Raziel gets to work his way up through his younger brothers, leading straight up to Kain himself.
    • This is something of a running theme in the Legacy of Kain series. First game opens with secondary character Vorador slaughtering six of the most powerful people in the world out of revenge; the game itself is Kain's rampage of revenge. In Soul Reaver 2, Raziel goes on another one against the mortal forms of himself and his brothers in the past, and Blood Omen 2 features Kain on yet another rampage.
  • "Cinderella was not simply an ill-used ninny who married well, forgave her tormentors, and lived happily ever after. She was innocent, she was abused, she was harmed. HER PAIN SHOULD BE PAID FOR!"
  • F.E.A.R. is just one looooooooooooooooooooooooong example of being on the other side of this trope. Alma is a very unhappy girl.
  • Shadow's response to Maria's death in the Sonic the Hedgehog series. First against humanity (stopped by Amy), then in the true ending of Shadow the Hedgehog directed against Black Doom. In his Crowning Moment of Awesome he doesn't stop with killing Black Doom. No, he proceeds to massacre the entire Black Arms army to a man with the Eclipse Canon.
  • Kirby Squeak Squad. Cake is stolen? Go beat up Dedede! Dedede doesn't have the cake, but some thieves do? Go beat them up!
    • Treasure chest does not contain cake? Beat up the thing that's in it!
  • In the DOS game Traffic Department 2142, the main character Lt. Velasquez has been on one of these ever since her father was killed. As the game goes on, her hatred builds, sending her on a downward spiral towards the Moral Event Horizon, before she finally "finds peace" in the form of even her being too tired of killing to go on doing it.
  • Seeking revenge for the death of his daughter, Tellah in Final Fantasy IV tries to kill Golbez with Meteo even though casting this powerful spell means Tellah's own death.
    • This isn't this trope, but simple revenge. Tellah doesn't gun for all of Golbez's minions and try to blast every last one of the Red Wings out of existence in a gory show. He wants Golbez's head on a pike, commits a Heroic Sacrifice to try to destroy Golbez, and fails hardcore since Golbez survives with his Plot Armor. Tellah's Plotline Death is setting up a double subversion of The Only One Allowed to Defeat You, since he fails, Cecil is set up as the one who should defeat Golbez, and then in The Reveal Golbez survives because he was being controlled by the Eldritch Abomination.
  • Presumably the reason behind No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Travis Touchdown rejoins the UAA for the purpose of avenging his friend's death (the one who would get your motorcycle for you in the first game. This being Travis, he doesn't have too many friends, so it's kind of a blow. Also, in No More Heroes, precision killing is simply not an option, regardless of motivation. Coincidentally, killing Bishop was part of the antagonists' own Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Messy, ain't it?
  • StarCraft's Sarah Kerrigan, over a dozen planets later and she's still getting warmed up. Well, there goes the universe!
  • What? No mention of Kratos from the God of War series? The man/god is practically an embodiment of the trope, and he doesn't settle for small fry revenge either. He starts with Ares, and then works his way through Olympus all because Zeus figured it was easier to betray and kill him than have a reasonable discussion.
    • Revenge is the central theme in God of War. Pretty much boils down to this: If they've crossed Kratos, they're going to die. Along with anyone and anything that stands in his way. Including Fate itself.
    • Also a deconstruction, as Kratos' unrelenting desire for revenge ultimately has dire consequences, showing how one man's desire for revenge can destroy everything that he once held dear ( first, his family is destroyed because he wanted revenge against the man who defeated him in battle, and then, ultimately, the whole world suffers for his devastating rampage).
  • The actual good ending to Laura Bow: The Colonel's Bequest tells you that Lillian did this.
  • Ramon Solano, the Big Bad of Mercenaries 2, might have come out on top, had he not pulled a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on the player merc, triggering a rampage across Venezuela that results in countless VZ casualties, billions of dollars in property damage, one destroyed castle, a few leveled cities, and two nuclear strikes.
  • Starkiller from the final stage of The Force Unleashed. Betray him once as part of some huge ass plan to take out the Emperor, he'll forgive and continue to serve you. Betray him again to get all the Emperor's enemies (and Starkiller's friends and allies) into one place to conveniently identify capture and present to the Emperor for execution, and it doesn't matter if you're one of the most powerful Sith Lords ever on a battle fortress the size of a moon with ten-thousand mooks guarding you, the good ending will earn you the most savage beating in Jedi history. The bad ending? Much worse.
  • Arcueid's kill list: #1: Roa whenever possible and as much as possible until he stays dead, damnit. #2: Dead Apostle Ancestors, so another 20 or so on the list. #3: Normal Dead Apostles, Demon Lords, people like the Church who get in her way. Kohaku's hero status is rather debatable but her targets go like this: Makihasa (done) Akiha and SHIKI (done in two out of five possible endings, SHIKI in all of them. Then maybe Shiki and anyone else related to the Tohno family she can think of.
  • Prototype. To quote Alex Mercer: "NOTHING CAN PROTECT YOU FROM ME! NOT MEN! NOT WEAPONS! NOT ARMOR!". And the guy about to get consumed? Was a Jerkass, but definitely not at the top of Alex's hit list.
    • Prototype 2 starts going on the same venue: the new protagonist James Heller has lost his family to Blacklight while he was overseas and goes on a rampage in the infected zone to get himself killed. Unfortunately for him, Alex finds him dying and injects him with the virus, transforming him into the same Super Prototype as himself. Needless to say, James doesn't take it well.
  • An early mission of Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars involves driving through the turf of rival dealers while your employer opens up on everybody with a machine gun in retaliation for stolen business. Oh, and a previous mission involves tracking down someone who cheated him and cutting his heart out.
  • In Half-Life 2, Gordon Freeman enters the enemy base, alone, at the end of the game. All his weapons are taken from him, except for the Gravity Gun, which becomes ultra-powered and capable of even grabbing enemy soldiers. All his friends have been captured. The entire end-game segment lets the player go berserk on the enemy with the Gravity Gun, torturing and maiming them in every way imaginable, while Dr. Breen, his old supervisor, calls him worthless.
    • Its very likely the entirety of the next episode will be like this for the PLAYERS considering Eli's death at the end of Episode 2.
  • The final escape in Super Metroid follows Mother Brain destroying the Metroid Larva, which was trying to protect Samus in the first place. After it dies, it gives her the Hyper Beam, an insanely-powered, wall-piercing rainbow gun. So Samus, after being thrown around by Mother Brain like a chew toy, goes on a rampage against it and then on the entire base.
    • Practically every encounter she has with Space Pirates could turn into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. In the backstory, they destroyed the colony where she lived and killed everyone else, including her parents (one of whom was ripped apart and eaten by Ridley right in front of her). Yeah, the Pirates have a damn good reason to be afraid whenever "The Hunter" shows up.
    • This reaches its epitome in Metroid: Zero Mission. After being forced to evade countless Space Pirates on their own ship without your weapons or armor, you get your Power Armor back and get to go on perhaps the most satisfying Roaring Rampage of Revenge in any video game.
  • Heavenly Sword has Nariko going on one of these when King Bohan kidnaps her father. She literally tears through his entire army to get at him.
  • You do NOT mess with Yuka's flowers. Your life will become VERY short.
  • In Xenogears, Id goes on one of these after the villains try to kill the woman he...well, he doesn't exactly love her, but he considers her to be his. He ends up destroying an entire floating city and causing the deaths of at least thousands of innocent people.
    • To put this in perspective, the city is designed to utterly destroy a full assault from the entire military forces of the rest of the world combined without so much as causing a cup in the city to quiver. Id ripped through the entire city with full defenses operational and firing in roughly ten minutes.
  • In all Dynasty Warriors games, Liu Bei and Zhang Fei get sent into this when they find out that Wu has assassinated Guan Yu and Guan Ping. Result a Genocide leaving no one in Wu alive.
  • Tekken newcomer Miguel had a sister whom he adored (to a very creepy degree). Of course, she's gone and died on her wedding day, and since the Mishima Zaibatsu is to blame, Miguel is now out to ruin Jin Kazama's shit.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Take every nightmare you suffered as a child that was induced by a Disney film. Chernabog, the mountain demon from Fantasia. Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. Anything Disney did to make you need that nightlight as a kid...take it all, go play Kingdom Hearts, and savor your revenge.
    • And while we're on the topic of Kingdom Hearts, Roxas in 358/2 Days. He was forced to kill and absorb one of his best friends, so he ends up going on a one-man invasion of the entire World That Never Was to set Kingdom Hearts free and put Organization XIII in their place, easily taking out Neo Shadows in a single hit. And throughout all of this his memories of Xion are fading, to the point that when he begins his battle with Riku he only remembers his best friend as "her". Unfortunately for Roxas, Riku puts a stop to his rampage before he can even get to the Castle That Never Was. In the end, it was probably for the best, since if Roxas got himself killed fighting Xemnas & company, Sora would've been screwed as well.
    • In Kingdom Hearts II, when Goofy is knocked out and presumed killed by flying debris, King Mickey says "They'll pay for this!", throws off his cloak, and summons his Keyblade. Many Heartless were about to die.
  • Viking: Battle for Asgard: They just start piling up very quickly. Rakan joins Hel in destroying the world because Freya spurned him, Skarin goes on his own by fighting his way (offscreen) to Fenrir and releasing him when Freya essentially enslaves him, and Fenrir himself gets one against the Gods for chaining him up in the first place.
  • Wet: Rubi is set up by Rupert Pelham, who is in charge of a global drug ring, to take the fall for killing William Ackers's son. How does she get even? This is the page for Roaring Rampage of Revenge, what do you think?
  • The exact words of the trope name are used by the narrator of House of the Dead: Overkill when describing Varla's motivation. (Her brother turned himself into a monster while trying to kill Papa Caesar, so she wants Papa Caesar dead. The heroes are the ones who actually killed her brother, but it was a I Cannot Self-Terminate, so they don't get the blame.)
  • Ezio from Assassin's Creed II starts out with the family business of killing people in revenge for the death of his father and two brothers. Then it extends to that family's bosses, and their bosses, right up and into the Ancient Conspiracy central to the game, for over thirty year]. To reword Seanbaby:

At the time, the country of Italy was using Ezio Auditore to control the aristocrat population and they occasionally dragged him on a chain through the air to hunt Templars in the least humane way possible.

      • In a bit of a subversion, however, by the last quarter of the game, Ezio is shown to be getting tired of his constant desire for revenge, which dovetails neatly into his plan to set up the Assassins Brotherhood to oppose the Templars systematically rather than in a reactionary way in Brotherhood and Revelations.
    • In Brotherhood, he finally stops and spares the one who caused it all. Sparing Borgia turns out to be a bad idea after all.
    • He does this again in Revelations when he finds out about Yusuf's death and Sofia's kidnapping.
  • The Godfather is essentially one of these for player character Aldo Trapani. Don Emilio Barzini had your father killed. You get recruited as a Corleone hatchetman. It's convenient that the Corleone goals of taking over NYC and crushing the other four families align with your own.
  • In Sins of a Solar Empire you have an entire star nation going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge; the Advent. You see, the Advent's ancestors were a religious order on a remote desert planet that was experimenting with cybernetic implants and Psychic Powers in an attempt to unite humanity in a peaceful coexistent society when they were found by the Trade Order. The Xenophobic Trade Order, which decided the Advent were too different to coexist with the rest of human society. So they exiled the Advent into deep space without first taking away or destroying their psychic and cybernetic research. Predictably, the Advent continue to develop those technologies and build a formidable empire with a large fleet of some very powerful warships outside Trader space; all the while brooding over their mistreatment and exile. A few generations later the first Advent fleets cross back into Trader space intent on reclaiming their homeworld and punishing the Trade Order (now known as the Trader Emergency Coalation-TEC).
  • In Breath of Fire IV, when it looks like Fou-lu might fall in love with a peasant girl and seen that there are decent humans in the world...before he's forced to run away and Mami was captured, tortured and sacrificed as a thermonuclear fuel for the Carronade, because her love for him will make it stronger. After surviving the blast, Fou-lu saw Mami's bell fell from the sky and landed near him. Understandably, he's royally pissed off.
  • Liara T'Soni becomes obsessed with Shepard to the point where she is willing to work with Cerberus after the Collector attack. When the Shadow Broker tries to sell Shepard out to the Collecters Liara does not take it well, and starts working with criminals, Asari commandos, threatening to kill her contacts with their own spine, all to get back at the Shadow Broker. When she finds out that her friend Faron, who was captured and presumed killed by the Shadow Broker, is alive, however, her motive rapidly change from revenge to rescue...with a revenge flavor. Zaeed has a similar motive against Vido Santiago, and it is an implied part of Commander Shepard's backstory if the Colonist background is combined with a Ruthless reputation.
    • Could be a trait of Asari. The Unfettered Combat Pragmatist Aria gets kicked out of her home base on Omega by Cerebrus in Mass Effect 3, but doesn't really care about an intricate plan to get back at them:

Shepard: "How do you plan on getting Omega back?"
Aria: "I think I am going to employ violence."

    • Garrus's men (when he was Archangel) are this as well.
  • While it's only a side goal and you'd much rather just take out their head, you still get a list of the conspirators in XIII. This is kind of interesting at first as everyone on the list but your traitorous self, even the lowest rankers, are bosses for the first 85% of the game, and it seems like the game is setting up an all-boss rampage like some of the excellent examples above. Unfortunately, you end up killing about half of them in the second last stage, dressed in Klan outfits and equipped with no more AI or HP than the average mook. Oh, and the leader escapes to the sequel that will never be.
  • Wylfred, "hero" of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, accepts a deal with pretty much our equivalent of the devil to go on a roaring rampage against a valkyrie.
  • The entire premise of Darksiders is that the Horseman of War is on a quest to kill the ones responsible for his fall from grace. Samael even honors his deal with War when he could easily betray him because he actually respects a good ol' Roaring Rampage of Revenge. When he discovers that the Charred Council made him their Unwitting Pawn and faked his fall from grace in a breach of the pact he and the rest of the Horsemen obey, he decides to go after them with the help of his fellow Horsemen.
  • Basically the entirety of Lugaru, by the end of the game, nearly every named character has been revealed as a traitor.
  • In Sengoku Basara 3, Ishida Mitsunari is out to kill Tokugawa Ieyasu in revenge for his master. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to stop him. And God help you if you get in his way. He'll add you to his list.
  • The entire premise of Splinter Cell: Conviction is centered around Sam Fisher's hunt to avenge his daughter's murder. Except she wasn't murdered. Her "death" was engineered by Lambert in order to focus Sam on a specific mission. Grim is manipulating Sam with the knowledge that his daughter is alive, in an attempt to get him to help her stop a military coup in the US. Sam agrees, but when the job is done, he makes it clear that if anyone from his past contacts his again, he won't be merciful. And then, in the ending, when his friend is relating the tale to the Black Arrow mercenaries that have captured him, the base is rocked with explosions, as Sam goes to save the last friend he has...
  • In Sub Machine 8: The Core, all the devastation in the Winter Palace is revealed to have been Murtaugh's fault, because the death toll from his Portal Network tearing everything apart led those affected to those in charge attempting to bury him in the Lighthouse; this didn't turn out so well for those in charge.
  • Kristoph Gavin in Apollo Justice Ace Attorney has this combined with total Disproportionate Retribution. After getting Phoenix disbarred, he stalked everyone involved in the case, then he killed a magician, an artist, and he almost killed the artist's daughter. What caused this quest for revenge, you ask? His client, a famous magician whose successful defense would have brought Gavin much fame, wanted a different lawyer to defend him.
  • Chloe Valens of Tales of Legendia heads to the the Legacy in order to track down her parents' killer, a man with a snake tattoo. Any time she even sees his face she flies into a fury.
  • In Fate Stay Night's Unlimited Blade Works route's (True Ending), Gilgamesh insults Saber after her Heroic Sacrifice to destroy the Holy Grail. Shirou gets pissed, and proceeds to bash the King of Heroes all over the place, before cutting off his arm and throwing him into a tear in space-time.
  • The Big Bad in Ghost Trick spends years carrying out a meticulously crafted plan to punish everyone involved with his death, including the then-young girl he took hostage.
  • Craig Boone in Fallout: New Vegas devotes his life to destroying the Legion, who bought his wife as a slave and forced him to perform a Mercy Kill on her, and will sign up to aid you if you promise him the opportunity to fight against them.

Courier: Any thought's on Caesar's Legion?
Boone: Lots of thoughts. All about the best ways to kill them.

  • Mortal Kombat has a lot of characters with revenge as a motive. The best known probably being series mascot Scorpion; a spectral ninja whose story in the first game revolved around killing Sub-Zero, the man who killed him, his clan, and his wife and son. As it turns out, Sub-Zero only killed Scorpion; his family and clan were killed by Quan Chi, the sorceror who allowed him to seek revenge against Sub-Zero. When Scorpion finds this out, he switches targets to seeking revenge on Quan Chi.
    • Kung Lao is the first to discover Liu Kang's body in Deadly Alliance after the eponymous pair snap his neck. He vows revenge against the duo and seeks an old master to train for their defeat. It doesn't end well for him either, in spite of that. The roles are reversed in Mortal Kombat 9, wherein Kung Lao successfully defeats every challenger Shao Kahn puts before him until Kahn himself simply walks up behind him and breaks his neck. Liu Kang then challenges Kahn and this time puts a fiery fist right through his chest.
  • In Kingpin Life of Crime, the main character is brutally beaten by thugs working for Nikki Blanco, and he's told never to come back. Instead, he sets across the landscape, destroying the Mafia run businesses, killing numerous members, and going after Nikki's boss to finally take control for himself.
  • True Crime: Streets of LA has an optional story arc in which Nick Kang, on failing to rescue his brother, himself goes on a roaring rampage of revenge to find and kill the man responsible, having already been slightly pushed over the edge by the death of his father prior to the game's beginning. Said rampage leads to one of the "bad endings" in the game, since Nick is left with unanswered questions regarding his own father's fate - the secret dies with the endgame boss.
  • In Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Lance Vance attempts to engage in one of this when avenging the death of his brother at the hands of Diaz's men. He fails, and makes things more difficult for Tommy, who is already having a difficult enough time trying to maintain the unstable drug lord's trust.
  • An unlockable Shotguns Are Just Better in Team Fortress 2 for the Engineer allows you to avenge your turret, giving you a guaranteed Critical Hit for every kill the turret made while it was still around.
  • In The Reconstruction, Dehl goes on one in chapter 6 after having a Freak-Out that causes his personality to invert. This temporary personality change makes some of his skill descriptions read almost like black comedy.

"The serene, peaceful nature of the knight manifests in enhanced inner traits."

  • Laharl goes on one when his Implied Love Interest Flonne is turned into a flower, triggering the final boss battle. What happens after the fighting ends depends on what actions the player took up until then.
  • Mushihime-sama Futari. Queen Larsa's son Aki dies at the hands of Reco, driving her to declare war on the Shinjuu Forest. She even goes as far as to disown her only remaining son and leave him to die when he openly admits that he believes Reco to be a good person and that Aki's death was an accident.
    • It should be noted that Larsa's boss battle has been given the dubious distinction of one of the most frustratingly difficult in gaming history. There has never been a documented case of a player defeating her without continuing at least once (which restores your health and preserves the damage you've done to her's). In other words, she succeeds.
  • Star Wars Battlefront II, Imperial Campaign. It's right after the Battle of Yavin. The Rebellion has destroyed the Death Star, killing untold numbers of your fellow servicemen. Your mission? Payback time. You're going to wipe out every last one you can find and blow their base to bits.
  • Saints Row 2: the latter part of the Brotherhood storyline (for both sides), an excellent example of why having someone actually roar and rampage is a lot better than being calm and deliberate when your the one they want revenge on.
  • Asura from Asura's Wrath out rivals EVERYONE on this entire Trope page when it comes to this. He will stop at NOTHING to get his daughter back. He takes this EVEN FURTHER when a girl that looks like the daughter his is trying to save is killed by the Seven Deities along with her entire village. by destroying the ENTIRE FLEET that Olga sent to destroy said village. If anyone represents the Patron Saint of this trope, it's Asura.
  • The entire plot for X3 Albion Prelude revolves around the Terran's roaring rampage of war and revenge after the Argon Federation blows up the Torus Aeternal, a massive orbital shipyard / city for tens of millions / defense installation that wraps entirely around Earth.


Web Comics

  • "The place reeked of Martians. I don't know why, but they killed him. So I killed the Martians." But not really.
  • In Sluggy Freelance Oasis has gone on a couple of these against Zoe for taking Torg's affection away from her.
  • The catgirls in Something*Positive. Apparently they weren't enjoying the convention; "They cancelled the fanfic panels. The con banned the sale of yaoi. The Twilight panel was nothing but heckling of all the books." The guy on the comics panel telling them their favourite comic sucked and Jason calling them out for overreaction when they killed him just pushed them over the edge.
  • Zeetha in Girl Genius. She was captured by pirates on her way to visit the wider world from her home, a "lost" city in the jungle, and her crewmates were killed. She slaughtered every pirate on the ship, shot down the rest of their fleet, and burnt down their stronghold. Only then did she realize she didn't know how to get back home and had just killed everyone who did.
    • Additionally, Agatha herself has a smaller rampage of revenge when Baron Wulfenbach kills Lars, one of her love interests. She drops a chicken house on him.
    • In this comic, Higgs is not very happy after Zeetha gets stabbed through the chest by Zola.
  • A story arc in The Order of the Stick features this. Vaarsuvius, the party's ambiguously-gendered elven mage happens to disintegrate a black dragon youngling only to later meet its angry grieving black dragon mother. She then unfolds a terrible vengeance plan involving his own children and horrific necromantic feats - a plan the weakened V is powerless to stop… or so it seems until he/she strikes a deal with demons and ends up harnessing the power of 3 evil archmage souls....and then goes on a superpowered Roaring Rampage Of (Pre-emptive) Revenge on Mama Dragon for daring to target his/her family. Say hello to the epic spell: Familicide.
  • Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has Jone going after a bunch of people that abused and blackmailed her and her mother shortly after the Orc god came to her in a vision.
  • Go read Rowasu's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Clark goes berserk and takes revenge in Gold Coin Comics.
  • Homestuck Vriska's "Make Her Pay" rallies everyone into rampage. Subverted with a punishing smackdown when she gets into the act.
    • Rose goes on one after discovering her mother's death.
      • Even more so after watching John getting run through by Bec Noir.
    • PM, after watching Jack kill pretty much everybody she ever cared about.
  • Honk.
  • Asperchu has a very sad one. The creature takes Sonichu and Asperchu to the Twin CWC Towers and tells Sonichu his father is here. He automatically assumes Ian Brandon Anderson and starts to hunt him down. The trope is played with when a) his Rampage of Revenge tears through people he once called allies; b) his attack destroyed the towers, something Ian is blamed for; and c) Ian wasn't the one Argentum was talking about - it was Asperchu!


Web Original

  • Adam Dodd of season one of Survival of the Fittest swears vengeance against Cody Jensen after Cody's definitive crossing of the Moral Event Horizon, raping and murdering his friend Madelaine Shirohara and accidentally killing his love interest, Amanda Jones, in the middle of trying to kill Sidney Crosby. After drifting for a while in a Heroic BSOD, Adam takes down everyone who tries to kill him one by one, and when Adam and Cody finally face off, Adam fulfills his vow of vengeance by putting a sword through Cody and then carving the word "rapist" into his chest.
  • One day, "God" reveals to all of humanity that the Pearly Gates are closed (and actually have been for some time), they're all condemned to Hell and he's even given Satan the okay to "wipe out" humanity (or rather, kill them and torture their souls in Hell for eternity). Humanity's reaction was The Salvation War.
  • Diamanda Hagan's reason for coming to Disneyworld in Project Million.
  • Warriors of Genesis: Gamma when his family was killed, resulted in a Unstoppable Rage.


Western Animation

  • In the finale of Superman the Animated Series, Superman is Brainwashed and Crazy by Darkseid to attack the Earth. By the time his true memories are restored, he is a pariah and Supergirl is in critical condition. Superman decides to "settle it" by going to Apokolips - taking down Parademons, Granny Goodness, the Furies, and Kalibak before facing Darkseid himself.
    • This is Darkseid's motive in the final episode of Justice League Unlimited and the DCAU as a whole, to get revenge on Superman for killing him a few seasons earlier, first by forcing him to see Earth burn then cutting his heart out with a kryptonite knife for a war trophy.
    • In an alternate universe where Lex Luthor is elected president and kills the Flash, Superman breaks into the White House and fries Luthor with his heat vision. Then the justice league takes over the entire world over this.
  • When Archer found out that the Irish mob had been selling people fake cancer medication, he went on what he described as a "Chemo-fuelled rampage" straight out of Man on Fire (with a side order of Magnum, P.I.). Oh, and filmed the whole thing, and called the result "Terms of Enrampagement," or possibly "Casablumpkin."
  • Zim decides it's a good idea to look through time and replace certain objects with rubber piggies in order to horribly maim Dib. When his latest piggy actually 'kills' Dib, his father builds him an exoskeleton that gives him the strength of ten thousand little boys, which he then puts to very good use.
  • In a What If episode of Batman the Animated Series, we see just what Commander Gordon will do if Barbara is killed in the line of bat-duty.
  • When Eric Cartman decides to give Kyle his AIDS, Kyle does this claiming he is going to break everything he owns in a charge to Cartman's bedroom.
  • Arcee in Transformers Prime has a moment where she stormed the Decepticon ship, killing Vehicons to find an amnesic Optimus.
    • Optimus goes to fight Megatron in a one-to-one death match after the latter nearly killed Raf.


Real Life

  • When 14th century French noblewoman Jeanne de Clisson's husband was betrayed by his best friend and executed for treason, she sold all the Clisson lands to buy a fleet of warships, painted them black and dyed the sails red, and made herself a pirate admiral who only attacked French ships. If she found any noblemen aboard, she would execute them by beheading, the same fate that ended her husband's life. But she would always leave at least one sailor alive, so she could send him off with a message -- "Tell the king of France that the Lioness of Brittany is coming for him." (She never did get to kill the king, but the aid she provided to the English side likely played a significant role in the English victory at Crecy, one of the most important battles of the Hundred Years' War).
  • Octavian Caesar and Marc Antony ruthlessly hunting down the Tyrannicides of Julius Caesar, making this Older Than Feudalism.
    • As well as the failed revenge campaign of Pompey the Great's son, Sextus, against the Second Triumvirate of Octavian, Antony and Lepidus.
    • Antony was not as vengeful as you might think. While it's true that Antony and Caesar were close friends for much of their lives as well as cousins they were not on particularly good terms when Caesar was assassinated. To compound matters everyone (including Antony) expected him to be Caesar's primary heir, but when the will was read Antony's name was not even mentioned. Plutarch went as far as to suggest that Antony knew about the plot and allowed it to happen, and for his part Antony actually pardoned the assassins at first. Though he famously denounced them as murderers during his eulogy of Caesar. (Octavian on the other hand epitomized this trope, going as far as to recruit an army and march on Rome while he was nineteen.)
  • As referred to above under Film, after the "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", Wyatt Earp hunted down and killed most of the Clanton gang. Not because of the shootout; because three weeks later, Ike's boys shot and killed Wyatt's brother Morgan, while he was playing billiards. And did it from behind, to boot. The "Gunfight" was just business for Wyatt, due to his being town marshal and the Clantons refusing to abide by the local "no guns inside the deadline" ordinance. Backshooting his brother made it personal.
  • Following the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel's Mossad launched several operations to kill as many Palestinian operatives as they could find information on who may or may not have been associated with the attack. Israel still denies the operations took place (as they were extremely illegal in international law).
  • There was also Operation Nemesis (named after the Greek Goddess of divine retribution) carried out by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which was payback for the Armenian Genocide. For more information, look here.
  • When Steve Irwin died, some Australians did not take his death well and condemned the stingrays, the creature that killed him (in self-defence). Thus, shortly after, several mutilated stingrays were found near some of Australian beaches. Irwin's friends took notice and condemned the mutilators, because Irwin wouldn't have wanted a retribution on those who caused his death. You know... the same animals that Steve Irwin dedicated his life to preserving.
    • ... or, in this case, on completely innocent members of the same barely-sentient species.
  • The utter carnage wreaked by the Red Army when it entered Germany during World War II was seen by the Soviets as justified vengeance for the 25+ million dead (the vast majority civilians) that the Soviet Union had suffered. To use the word "hatred" to describe Soviet feelings about the Germans is to reveal the limitations of the English language in describing emotion: practically every single Soviet soldier at this point in the war had a personal, murderous vendetta against Germany that was finally being given vent.
  • After being gang raped by villagers incited by the upper-caste man who killed her lover, the Thakur Sri Ram, Phoolan Devi put together her own gang of bandits and avenged reports of rape and abuse through castration and dismemberment of the perpetrators. Based on reports that Sri Ram could be found in one of those villages, she returned with her gang and, in frustration at not being able to find him, executed 22 Thakur men, turning her into India's most wanted but also a folk hero eventually elected to Parliament. Fictionalized as the film Bandit Queen.
  • When Queen Boudicca's husband died, Rome decided to abandon all pretense of playing nice and annexed her kingdom. When she objected, they had her flogged and raped her daughters in front of her. Boudicca then rallied a massive army of rebel Celts and led a bloody crusade against the Romans occupying Britain. Before she was stopped, she sacked three of Britain's largest Roman cities, killing at least 70,000 civilians in the process. It required three entire Roman legions to finally bring her down.
    • That is, the first legion that tried it found itself outnumbered fifty to one at least, so no surprise at the result there (all the infantry were wiped out, some of the cavalry and the senior officers escaped). Boudicca's last stand, the Battle of Watling Street, saw her faced by two legions, mustering about 5% of her own numbers. It was a complete Curb Stomp Battle, but not the way Boudicca was hoping.
  • Do you remember the Khwarezmian Empire? No? There's a good reason for that. Mainly because Genghis Khan literally wiped the entire civilization out of existence. The reason? Because one of the local governors harassed and even killed some of Genghis Khan's emissaries. When he was captured, that particular governor allegedly had molten silver poured into his eyes and mouth.
    • This is one reason why you shouldn't shoot the messenger. Especially Genghis Khan's messenger. It should be mentioned that it was a messenger of peace, and that Genghis Khan sent them messengers twice, basically giving them a second chance after killing his first messengers. After the second time, well, he destroyed them all.
  • In first century Vietnam lived two sisters named Trung Trac and Trung Nhi. When Trac's husband stood up against the ruling Chinese, he was killed and Trac was raped. But what the Chinese didn't know was that the Trung sisters had been trained from childhood in the art of warfare and the martial arts. The sisters raised an army of 80,000, mostly women, and took back as many as 65 citadels before the Chinese managed to defeat them. Rather than die at the hands of the Chinese, the two sisters drowned themselves. Needless to say, the Trung sisters are highly revered in Vietnam.
  • Marvin Heemeyer's rampage through the town of Granby, Colorado in a heavily armored bulldozer on June 4, 2004.
  • John "Liver-Eating" Johnson. Mountain man in the American west, Crow indians killed his pregnant wife. He proceeded to spend the next twenty five years hunting down the Crow, killing them, taking a bite out of their livers and spitting it out, declaring it unfit to eat as an insult. After amassing a body count of roughly forty, the Crows finally decided to make peace with him, inviting him into the tribe and making him an honorary chieftain.
  • Prior to becoming one of the victims in the Wonderland Murders, Ron Launius was a mercenary and a drug dealer who was a suspect in over two dozen murder cases, but could never be convicted because of the sudden deaths of so many of the witnesses. He once made a trip to Mexico to buy from members of a drug cartel, but they instead robbed him and held his wife for ransom. Launius robbed two banks to pay his wife's ransom, then killed the kidnappers anyway. He also killed the men who had set up the deal.
  • Buford Pusser was a sheriff in Tennessee whose wife was raped and murdered by several men. He single-handedly killed every man and then went on to take up moonshining, illegal gambling, and several other criminal activities before dying in a car accident.
  • The Barbary Pirates send and demanded tribute from a certain obscure new nation on the grounds that Nobody Ever Complained Before. The result was that the US Navy came after them and spent several years beating on them. During the The War of 1812 the Barbary Pirates went back to their old tricks and afterwords the US Navy returned and gave them another whaling. At this the British decided that the colonials had a pretty good idea going, peace having broken out in Europe. So they sent the Royal Navy after them. Finally after all that was done, the French simply landed and conquered the whole area.
  • On a recon mission in WWII, Leo Major's best friend Willy was killed by Nazis. Leo responded by strapping three machine guns to his back, grabbing a sack of grenades, and went on the warpath, leaving a trail of destruction so great the Nazis were convinced they were fighting an entire attack force. He proceeded to bust down a door and kill four Nazi high commanders before burning down the Gestapo headquarters nearby. He proved to be such an unstoppable killing machine, the entire Nazi garrison retreated.
  • When Bashkirian Airways Tupolev 154 and DHL cargo Boeing 757 collided into each other at Überlingen, Swiss and German border 2002, 74 people were killed. Among those were wife and two kids of Ossetian architect Vitaly Kaloyev. The accident was due to flight control error. As the flight control corporation refused to take any responsibility of what had happened, Kaloyev hired a private investigator to find out the individual flight controller who had been at job at that fateful night. It turned out to be Danish man named Peter Nielsen. So Kaloyev tracked him down, and stabbed him to death with a knife at the face of Nielsen's wife and three children. 24 February 2004. The Swiss police tracked him and he was sentenced from murder. He was released from prison on basis of insanity in November 2007 and banished from Switzerland. He received a hero's welcome home in Russia, and he was nominated as the Minister of Public Constructions in Ossetia.
  • The United States in World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
  • In March 1944, Chindit George Cairns was involved in attack on a Japanese-held hill. When a Japanese officer hacked off his arm with a katana, he went berserk, killed him, grabbed the katana in his remaining arm, and sprinted up the hill, chopping any Japanese soldier anywhere near him. He left a trail of blood and dead and wounded Japanese until he fell over dead. From blood loss from his severed arm.
  • While most movies hinge on this premise, this is not a good thing for most people to do or think of doing if a friend or family member gets raped/beaten/otherwise traumatized at the hands of others. Apart from the many obvious legal problems involved, since they're already terrified and vulnerable, bloodthirsty rage from their previously nonthreatening loved ones will usually freak the victim out even more.
  • After Prince Igor of Kiev was killed by the tribe of Drevlians, they send 20 ambassadors to his widow, Princess Olga, to convince her to marry their Prince Mal. She buried them alive. After that she asked Mal to send his best men to help her on her journey to him. She invited them to the bathouse, locked them up and set the building on fire. Then she invited some more Drevlians to her husband's funeral, and, after they were drunken, killed about 5,000 of them. And then Olga went to war against them, and defeated them, and burned down their capital Iskorosten'.
  1. ↑ Though that may well kill them
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.