Interests: anime, comics, and games studies / gender / space / intellectual history. An observer on the margins, overflowing with empathy.
All praise to Teacher Zhong.1
This article contains extensive spoilers for both Masamune-kun’s Revenge and Goblin Slayer. Read at your discretion.
Readers familiar with anime, manga, and fiction will be no strangers to the conventions and “formulas” writers use. Whether it is the bond represented by a lock and key, the boy-meets-girls encounter, reincarnation stories, or gender-swap fiction, creators seem tireless in supplying obvious signals of where a work’s main plot and ending are headed, its intended audience, and its general emotional tone. Yet these conventions also guide you into the text, drawing you into the author’s plot until you are so immersed in its world that you almost forget the clichéd premise everyone was mocking at the outset (“Okay, I love it!”). Some formulas earn the label ōdō, the “royal road” of storytelling, indicating their broad acceptance and endorsement in the market. At the same time, formulas clear a path for critics to enter into textual analysis. Without these familiar patterns deeply imprinted on the ways readers appreciate works, without these basic formulas setting the terms of a work’s structure, analysis would face obstacle after obstacle from conceptual ambiguity and the variety of possible interpretations. After all, even the most unsophisticated viewer can recognize Re:ZERO −Starting Life in Another World− as a story of rebirth in another world, and DARLING in the FRANXX as a mecha show reeking of romance. These elements give us something to talk about.
If we broadly agree about these conventions or formulas, we can select representative ones as points of entry for analysis. That is what this article sets out to do. Among all these formulas, revenge drama seems to stand apart. Whether revenge establishes a work’s overall tone or supplies a sequence within a particular arc, many revenge dramas have much to recommend them. The reason is that “revenge” not only directly suggests an irreconcilable conflict; it also clearly identifies the “avenger” and the “target of revenge,” making it simple to construct clear relationships between characters. More accomplished writers can even elevate revenge drama to the dialectical interplay of desire and recognition in a character’s psyche—for instance, that perennial crowd-pleaser, the hero’s corruption. These distinctive features give the formula both a relatively low barrier to entry and a higher ceiling than people might imagine.
Of course, revenge as a concept merely indicates a subject–object relation. If we understand it at the level of the story rather than the work, it tells us only that some antagonism exists between protagonists, or between protagonist and enemy. All we gain is another tangled emotional experience. (Someone’s father has been killed, so he sets out for revenge; that girl hurt my feelings, so I will hurt hers in return; my father, a murderer, once imprisoned you, making our relationship ambiguous and fraught.) The struggle between characters may sometimes be more intriguing than an examination of the text itself. Yet understanding a work through its relational and narrative structures, rather than simply “experiencing” it, not only lets us sidestep unnecessary shipping wars; it also seems to offer a better sense of this model’s “cruelty,” through the structural tensions between work and characters. I intend to examine narrative structure and the structure of character relationships in Goblin Slayer, whose anime adaptation is about to air, and Masamune-kun’s Revenge, whose manga concluded at the end of last month.2
Narrative Structure: Symbolic Markers and “Retracing” in Revenge Drama
Before the analysis, let us do a little admittedly dry conceptual clarification. First, revenge drama is a kind of “drama.” Here I understand that as a narrative sequence: it can serve as the main axis of a particular storyline or as the core running through every storyline in a work. “Revenge,” meanwhile, concerns the emergence and dissolution of “debts of gratitude” and “grievances” between two subjects. Its narrative character lies precisely in the dialectical movement of these ties. Wherever revenge is involved, there must be a painful memory difficult to speak of, together with a series of actual deeds grounded in that early experience and reaching across time and space into the “present.”
I propose to examine revenge along two dimensions: time and space. In our ordinary understanding, revenge first means having a grievance. That grievance is the scar one subject leaves on another; the word also implies an aggressive tendency toward whoever inflicted it, intended to cancel out the pain the scar causes. Second, revenge has a spatial orientation. The infliction of the scar and the act of revenge necessarily occur within a synchronic structure, in relation to a particular scene. For Goblin Slayer, this is the place where he witnessed his sister’s murder; for Masamune, it is the spot beneath the Western-style mansion where his young, fat self stood when “Aki” rejected him. A particular unresolved problem also invariably persists through the structure of the whole work, or some part of it. Psychoanalysts like to take this ordinary understanding a step further: revenge also implies an irreconcilable contradiction between the self and its reflexive relation to itself. When this takes the binary form of good and evil in a text, we have the familiar story of the hero fighting the dragon; when it persists throughout the text as an effort to keep oneself under control, we have an obsessional existential journey—the Macbeth effect.3 This generalized model of revenge drama offers clues for a structural analysis of desire, which I will explain in detail in the second half of the article.
Revenge’s narrative character involves continuity and rupture between actions—that is, continuity and rupture in history. The history of being bullied and the history of taking revenge remain entangled, bound by lingering, painful ties. The moment a revenge drama begins, it sets two storylines in motion: one recounts the wrongs the protagonist suffered in the “past tense”; the other follows the protagonist’s revenge in the “present continuous,” with something still caught in the throat. This reveals the antagonism between protagonist and “enemy” in the main storyline, while also providing an opening for flashbacks. And this “obstruction”—or, to use a familiar, related concept, the narrative setup—is crucial to identifying whether something constitutes revenge drama. A well-handled rehabilitation of a villain in the reader’s eyes can be understood as the smallest unit of “revenge drama.” (To understand this, we must understand revenge as the villain’s meta-level revenge on the reader’s transference.) A good work rehabilitates its villain skillfully by first introducing an “obstruction,” letting readers know that some hidden circumstance remains unexplained in the villain’s past. Then, as the villain is about to leave the stage, this obstruction allows the audience to reconnect the character’s separated times and spaces. We understand the villain’s predicament, the accumulated history that made them a villain, and their tragic position within the work’s relations of power. Understanding is finally achieved, and the villain comes vividly to life. Here the obstruction performs the important function of “re-embedding”: it links the “past-tense” villain whose history rehabilitates them with the villain of the “present tense,” so the change does not feel too forced. Without such a marker, by contrast, the audience cannot construct that connection between the present and past villain during the rehabilitation. (Of course, some characterizations simply do not care about rehabilitating the villain. For Junko Enoshima in Danganronpa, despair is despair—not something else waiting to be traced back.)
Let us now replace “obstruction” with a more formal term: symbolic marker. In what concrete forms do these symbolic markers appear in a text? Revenge involves both rupture and continuity across time and space in the gratitude and grievances binding two subjects. For living people, the most obvious marker sustaining this continuity is our own body: a scar from a fight in our youth, for instance, or the stretch marks left by childbirth. In Masamune-kun’s Revenge, the protagonist’s face—the face of a romantic lead from a work aimed at women—and his tall, well-built physique are the most obvious symbolic markers. As outside observers, we would have no way of knowing what Masamune’s body used to look like, and thus no way of discovering or understanding his motive for taking revenge on Aki. It is precisely because Masamune is the protagonist that we can look through his body—the contrast between thin and fat presented in the manga—to find compelling grounds for his revenge against Aki and evidence of his resolve to carry it out. This also delivers a surprise to readers, just as expected. (Fat Otaku Becomes Tall, Rich, and Handsome and Turns the Tables on a Pretty Girl—satisfying, right?) Similarly, in Goblin Slayer, the protagonist’s foul-smelling armor, smeared with fur and blood, and the deliberate concealment of his face point even more forcefully toward the central knot of revenge. As a way of presenting the character, it also reaches further into the structure of his desires.
The second obvious symbolic marker is a character’s memory. Memory is the inward side, the body the outward. Particular memories are often inseparable from bodily images—hence the expression “body memory.” I distinguish them here because, in fiction and manga, time and narrative length matter more in the representation of memory than in the representation of the body. What a bodily image can convey in a single close-up requires, as memory, a relatively complete presentation of a past time and space: a flashback in the proper sense. In revenge drama, the appearance of memory often involves a strong emotional response from the protagonist. It also connects the object of transference with the central knot of revenge, drawing the main storyline together. The appearance of a recollection therefore means that this time, this place, these feelings, and this scene now provide the conditions for revenge to be restaged. Finally, there is a third kind of symbolic marker, likewise often accompanying memory: object-signs, foreign to me yet imposed upon me. A scar, for example, can be understood both as the body functioning as a symbolic marker, in terms of one’s own sensations, and as an object-sign functioning as a symbolic marker, in terms of its outward appearance. The clearest example is language. In Masamune-kun’s Revenge, the name “Pig Legs” (豚足, literally “pig’s feet”) is itself a sign functioning as a symbolic marker, continually spurring Masamune toward revenge.
Through these distinctions and connections, we can see that symbolic markers act as knots joining time and space within a revenge relationship. Another important point is that the events setting a revenge plot off all revolve around the conflict of revenge. They imply that some motivating tendency in the past has been suspended and must resume in the “present tense,” violently or gently. The act of revenge has often been interrupted for a long time. Someone kills “my” teammate; enraged, I immediately kill them. So brief a struggle does not yet qualify as “revenge drama.” It is precisely the division of time and space sustained by symbolic markers that allows the storyline to continue, branching out from its central conflict and introducing complex human entanglements. Ultimately, revenge is always prolonged as a “delayed negation.”4 As an ordinary revenge drama approaches its end, the symbolic marker exits, allowing the work’s divided times and spaces to merge again. I call this “retracing.” Retracing means completing revenge’s closed loop: a “resolution” of the ties of gratitude and enmity. It usually comes at the cost of sacrificing the symbolic marker. In Masamune-kun’s Revenge, this takes the form of Masamune’s intention to give up controlling his weight and eat the sweets Aki has made, so that he can become the Masamune she loves; it also appears in the way memory is brought to life again in the penultimate chapter. In Goblin Slayer, one possible form of retracing would be some degree of exposure of the protagonist’s face, or new, fulfilling memories with his companions gradually dissolving the symbolic force of the humiliating memory of his sister’s murder.
Through these ties of gratitude and resentment, a work’s narrative performs a “disembedding” in time and space. The conflict does not emerge all at once. On the one hand, it is the premise on which the story unfolds, charged with prolonging it; on the other, it is itself a consequence of the work’s need to continue. The symbolic marker bears this stretch of time and space and brings revenge into the ongoing march of the “present tense.” Once the author is ready to establish a closed loop for the story, the symbolic marker completes the retracing at the most fitting moment by sacrificing its own symbolic force. For a dungeon RPG or a vulgar postmodern comedy, however, there is no such thing as a closed narrative loop. “Revenge” can then continue without end along the course of the subject’s enjoyment—jouissance. This is not necessarily a development readers welcome. In such cases, revenge sustains an unending pleasure, one that can persist only when the subject believes that complete revenge is impossible. Delay is therefore not merely a requirement of the plot. It is also a kind of aimless anticipation within the character’s psychic structure. We can thus begin to understand the delays of revenge drama through the structure of the characters’ desires.
The Structure of Desire: Hamlet and the Desire for Revenge
Alongside revenge drama’s distinctive narrative functions, I mentioned another structure much loved by psychoanalysts: the structure of desire. If the analysis of narrative structure reveals how a text’s storylines separate and reintegrate its central characters’ times and spaces, the analysis of desire’s structure goes a step further into the configuration of relations between avenger and target. This structure of character relationships also plays a decisive role in the work’s composition, which is why I discuss it alongside narrative structure.
Shakespeare’s great tragedy Hamlet offers a point of entry for analyzing all revenge drama. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is studying in Germany when he hears of his father’s death and returns home for the funeral. Unexpectedly, his uncle not only inherits the throne but also marries Hamlet’s mother a month after the funeral, becoming his stepfather. These earth-shattering changes plunge Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings into confusion. Later, his father’s ghost suddenly appears, tells Hamlet that his uncle poisoned him, and asks Hamlet to avenge him. At this point, the intense conflict within Hamlet erupts. On one side, his uncle has fulfilled the Oedipal wish repressed in his unconscious; on the other, his identification with paternal law—the injunction to revenge—generates hatred toward that uncle. “Revenge” suddenly becomes the knot of Hamlet’s symptoms.
To explain Hamlet’s inner conflict over revenge, Freud emphasized his depressive attitude.5 When someone we love dies, we generally withdraw, little by little, the portion of libido we transferred to the beloved. We regain self-sufficiency, while the beloved’s existence is prolonged in memory. Freud calls this process “mourning.” Hamlet’s problem is that he has neither sufficient time nor the opportunity to complete this work of mourning. His uncle becomes his stepfather with lightning speed; the symbolic father seems not to have died at all. In other words, Hamlet has lost the object of his mourning and can ultimately mourn only himself—a depressive structure.
Lacan takes the explanation of this “delayed revenge” further. According to the Oedipus complex, the object Hamlet originally lost was his own phallus. Believing that his father possesses this phallus, he projects his identification onto his father and receives the promise of paternal law within the symbolic order: one day, he can marry a woman like his mother. His father’s death means that the person who “possesses” the phallus has departed. Mourning is therefore accompanied by grief for the originally lost object—the phallus. (I mourn my mother, who has lost my father.) Yet while Hamlet is mourning, the uncle who brought about his father’s death becomes Hamlet’s father. The symbolic phallus has actually “returned.” This implies a paradox. What, exactly, does the maternal Other—the mother—desire? If the mother’s (the phallus’s) desire rests with the father, how can she so calmly marry the uncle? How has he come to have this stepfather? Here the perceptive Lacan discovers the crux of the problem: Hamlet’s tragedy is not that he cannot answer these questions. The emergence of these questions is itself the tragedy: from beginning to end, Hamlet cannot distinguish his own desire from the desire of the Other—his mother. He consequently enters a neurotic state of intense struggle with himself, taking on a depressive structure.
A crisis such as “the father’s murder” provides a way to examine how far the subject has completed the Oedipal process. Many revenge dramas like to place such an original trauma in the protagonist’s childhood. Innocent, carefree, even a little childish, the protagonist continually appeals to the Other for help and for the satisfaction of desire, in order to maintain this happiness in the Imaginary—pretending to possess the phallus. Goblin Slayer turns to his “sister”; fat little Masamune turns to little Aki. But a sudden upheaval shatters this insubstantial fantasy of desire. The goblin army finally attacks the peaceful village, and Goblin Slayer witnesses his family’s violation and murder. “Aki” finally stands at her window, viciously calls Masamune “Pig Legs,” and tells him never to come looking for her again. There is also a crucial turning point in the awakening of each protagonist’s desire for revenge: Goblin Slayer meets a terrifying “master” in a cave, while Masamune returns to his hometown to undergo rigorous training with his strict grandfather.
Goblin Slayer’s structure of desire operates in a way common to Western-style fantasy: broadly speaking, it is the story of a hero fighting a dragon. Goblins have violated the person he cherishes, shattering the perfect imaginary world in his mind. With the disappearance of the original object—his sister—the protagonist enters an agonizing process of mourning. Unlike Hamlet’s, however, this mourning is not interrupted. He can therefore remain in this state continuously, and his actions are more decisive than Hamlet’s: “To make my sister happy, I have to kill whatever makes her unhappy. There is no doubt about that.” What he shares with Hamlet is that this state results precisely from the inextricability of his own desire and the Other’s desire. His sister’s existence is prolonged in his memory, so every slaughter of goblins offers consolation to the sister who persists there. The protagonist himself, meanwhile, is an empty shell of desire. “I am nothing apart from the self that exists for my sister.” Through artistic means, deliberate or otherwise, this feature finds expression in the blank where a depiction of his actual face should be.
Once the subject’s desire has been replaced by the Other’s desire, revenge drama’s remaining task is to perfect the subject’s fantasy. If the protagonist equates his sister’s desire with his own, he must also set the corresponding mechanism of enjoyment in motion. He has to overcome his awareness of his own inadequacy—the fear of taking revenge alone and powerless. This “absence of fear” presupposes total fear in the unconscious. In the story, it appears as the change in outlook that follows the battered protagonist’s encounter with his “master,” who beats and berates him. The master continually denounces his weakness and incapacity, and the protagonist continually represses himself: he represses the thought that “wiping out the goblins is impossible,” which connects with the subject’s true desire, a mechanism of escape. Thus the protagonist becomes utterly consumed by a sense of inferiority, forcibly shattering the last remaining possibility of constructing a fantasy.
Here Goblin Slayer seems to acquire a psychic structure similar to that of the Nazis: my desire becomes indistinguishable from the Other’s desire, while an alien people possesses the enjoyment bound up with my desire; I must therefore rise up. Yet the way this works differs from the Nazi case. In the later part of the novel, we clearly see that Goblin Slayer’s world contains a powerful Demon Lord and all manner of mighty heroes. Goblins, the weakest creatures, are marginal to the main revenge conflicts in the story. We can readily imagine scenes even more cruel than the goblin army’s attack unfolding at every moment in this perilous fantasy world, where order and morality have collapsed. But none of that has anything to do with the protagonist. His desire is tragic after all. Its tragedy lies in this: unlike the Nazis, he has no world-historical narrative such as the Second World War; unlike Hamlet, he is not involved in conflicts within and between states. Within the story, his desire is insignificant, even banal beside those expansive grand narratives. Outside the story, the work is a subcultural product, likewise marginal to mainstream culture. Following the work’s perspective, we find ourselves confined to a corner of another world. Dimly sensing the tragedy of a weak individual’s struggle without an ending, we choose to evade that tragedy. He is a prophet of modernity in a fantasy world, a pawn. To readers outside the text, he offers an important existentialist answer: how does an individual denied a voice in mainstream discourse undertake revenge, and how is he borne along by desire? At the same time, he exhibits an anti-existentialist structure of desire: my desire is not mine, but the Other’s. It is as though we can seize the same pleasure as Goblin Slayer in those repeated, perilous reversals of fortune precisely because we unconsciously know that the game of hunting goblins never ends, and that an insignificant person’s voice carries little weight. Here we see cultural reflexivity.
The tension of this “individual-scale narrative” finds a lighter expression in romantic comedy. It offers “sweetness” as the other side of “cruelty,” becoming a relatively simple form of entertainment. The revenge model in Masamune-kun’s Revenge is common in romantic comedy: the protagonist’s “enemy” and “beloved” are often the same person—sworn enemies who cannot escape each other. Masamune’s plan, too, is to become a universally adored handsome boy, make Aki fall in love with him, and then dump her at the height of their romance. When Aki originally rejected Masamune, a separation and substitution of roles took place: the “imaginary Aki” separated from the “symbolic Aki.” The former was the object of desire who supported Masamune and helped him construct a narcissistic fantasy; the latter was an empty signifier in the image of the Cruel Princess. The symbolic Aki “killed” the Masamune immersed in narcissistic fantasy, forcibly dragging him into the Symbolic. The name “Pig Legs” declared: “You fatso, don’t imagine a pretty girl could ever love you.” Only then, it seems, did Masamune become conscious of his eternally missing phallus and begin the game of desire between love and revenge. In his subsequent revenge, Masamune tries to “retrace” the revenge scene: for the sake of a narcissistic illusion, his symbolic self—the rational, purposeful self—will “kill” Aki once she has transferred her affections to him.
The cleverness of the plot lies in the fact that the original traumatic scene setting revenge in motion does not hold up as Masamune understood it. It was not Aki who rejected him. It was Yoshino, Aki’s personal maid, impersonating her. The traumatic scene thus becomes vivid and intriguing. Bullied by others, Masamune lies outside Aki’s house, calling for her help. He dimly sees Aki’s silhouette appear at her bedroom window and assumes it is Aki herself. He therefore believes every hurtful word Yoshino says without hesitation. This misunderstanding of revenge itself becomes the work’s largest symbolic marker. Unraveling it supplies the crucial hidden storyline running through the whole drama, to the delight of readers immersed in the plot.
In other words, although the episode that provoked revenge was a misunderstanding, this only further proves that the “symbolic Aki” exists: she has had real effects on Masamune. The “symbolic Aki” has indeed been “killed,” but Masamune was not the one who did it. Tragic reality thus breaks through his fantasy of revenge. All this inevitably recalls Camus’s tragedy The Misunderstanding. Masamune faces the same existential predicament as Martha: everything I have done was wrong; with my own hands, I put the person I loved in the wrong position, as the target of revenge. Masamune’s task is not to pick up the pieces of the narcissistic illusion that reality has shattered. Rather, he must use this retracing to reconcile with his former self. For when Masamune set his desire for revenge in motion, the former “imaginary Masamune”—the Masamune who opened up his own true desire—was permanently abandoned in that time and place. The handsome Masamune of the present has constructed his fantasy precisely by excluding fat Masamune. Once the “avenging me” is shattered, he must return to the position of that former imaginary self and once again accept or sublate it.6
Here we encounter what Lacanian counselors describe as using an imaginary relationship to reorganize the knot of a character’s desires—maternal support—so that the person can distinguish the Other’s desire from their own. In Hamlet, this function is performed by Hamlet’s object of desire, Ophelia. In Goblin Slayer, a work steeped in male chauvinism, it is performed chiefly by the various heroines—our dear Priestess first and foremost, of course. Masamune, a straight man confronting the collapse of his revenge, needs a woman to undertake the psychic work his desire requires. Either Aki or Yoshino.
The manga’s handling of its ending meets the analyst’s expectation almost perfectly. But the next question immediately arises: what does Masamune in the present really desire? For the past “imaginary me,” desire undoubtedly points toward the Aki of the past, the Aki who loves that “imaginary me.” When Masamune encounters his “imaginary me,” he faces a choice concerning his desire: to give way to hysteria at the collapse of his revenge, or to accept this separation between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. In the manga, he answers that encounter by saying, “The enemy isn’t that person” (Aki) and “The enemy was destroyed long ago”—acknowledging the falseness of his desire for revenge. In short, Masamune quickly emerges from the bewilderment of revenge and inherits the desire of his imaginary self. He does not find a beloved’s companionship—maternal support—amid hysteria in the “present tense.” Instead, he retraces his early experience to reconnect desire in the present. This unsettling change seems to indicate that Aki is about to become the object of his desire. But then, at the end of the chapter, Yoshino appears—the instigator of the revenge drama, who has finally fallen in love with Masamune—and kisses him. This abrupt change breaks the reader’s train of thought. Yoshino seems to have it in the bag—poi.7
This is both the most tumultuous point in the work’s second half and a failure on the author’s part to bring the narrative strands together. Whether because space was limited or because the author deliberately staged little “reversal dramas”—let us provisionally call this a narrative technique and formula whose selling point is the use of rapid changes of pace to mislead readers—the relations between times and spaces remain fractured right up to the ending. In just three or four short concluding chapters, the work tries to wrench all its tangled relations of desire apart, only to achieve the opposite effect. After Aki dumps him, Masamune is almost astonishingly calm. His inner struggle is passed over with a simple “return home.” Only in the penultimate chapter does his conversation with the “imaginary me” offer readers an ambiguous signal. At the chapter’s end, Yoshino, whom everyone has been waiting for, is brought out to perform a tearjerking scene. If we start from the structure of desire of the work’s central character, Masamune, it is not too hard to see the falseness of the scene’s staging. From the standpoint of narrative structure, however, ordinary readers take in the immediate emotional impact of the images. The kiss sends the pacing into overdrive, and the reversal that follows toys with readers’ feelings. (Team Aki should have begun mourning its lost love; Team Yoshino should have begun its narcissistic fantasy.)
Looking beyond Masamune’s structure of desire, readers with some empathy for women—in a feminist sense—can readily see that Aki’s union with Masamune at the end might be an imaginary relationship she has constructed as her mature present self, or it might continue the imaginary relationship of the past. Either way, establishing this narcissistic fantasy replaces the “revenge drama” with a “Disney-princess drama.” We should recognize that the false-Masamune episode not only challenged Masamune’s revenge plan; it also became part of Aki’s own history of psychic growth, preparing the way for her unexpectedly mature actions later. Aki, who endured the pain of dumping Masamune, could have let everything go and prepared herself to accept reality; she could have wished Yoshino well and learned to live independently; she could have accepted her original trauma, left her earlier childishness behind, and recognized the many realities of relations between men and women. Yet Masamune’s confession at the end somehow sends everything back to its original form. Likewise, Yoshino, who should have escaped the Other’s desire—“for Aki”—by entering a romantic relationship with Masamune, instead begins mourning a lost love. Yoshino’s sense of self was weak to begin with: how will she learn to let go after this loss? Will she return to living “for Aki”? Will she make the lost Masamune an eternal objet petit a—the object-cause of desire—and enter a depressive “drama of unrequited love”? This plants a time bomb of unease for readers, especially Team Yoshino. The brief final chapter makes the emotional threads complicated all over again, knotting together a structure of desire that had already become relatively clear.
Overall, Masamune-kun’s Revenge accomplishes what a romantic comedy is supposed to accomplish: “the lovers finally come together.” This offers some inspiration for how other revenge dramas might arrange their endings, especially hard-core revenge dramas such as Goblin Slayer. Readers who have followed this far will readily see that “romantic revenge drama” and “hard-core revenge drama” form two sides because each possesses what the other lacks. Romantic revenge drama lacks the pain of perpetual lack and the futile pursuit it entails. The vision it offers is imaginary: a sweet closed loop. Hard-core revenge drama, meanwhile, lacks support in the Imaginary; it offers unparalleled cruelty and recurring revenge, a bitter closed loop. Of course, neither is barred from incorporating what the other supplies. Take the possibilities suggested above: after giving up Masamune, Aki might not accept him again, but instead begin a long struggle alone, learning to take charge of her fate without relying on a man. Yoshino and Masamune’s relationship would be far from smooth sailing, with complex entanglements between feelings and ideas. Goblin Slayer, meanwhile, might have a “romance.” He would need to realize how much his companions value him and, through being valued, accept himself anew and recognize the immorality of his fanatical desire for revenge.
Goblin Slayer needs to decide where it stands on a crucial question: does it intend to follow Hamlet toward an uncompromising tragedy of desire, or use romantic-comedy elements to follow the “royal road”? The former means the protagonist’s destruction: the killer who slaughters goblins finally becomes a monster. The heroine who serves as his object of desire would then have to leave the stage at the crucial moment—or, rather, she would never have succeeded in transforming him through her love. The latter means the protagonist’s self-acceptance: accepting that “the dead cannot return to life” and that “the goblins can never all be killed.” What matters is sharing hardship and happiness with one’s beloved and companions. The heroine’s role at this point is to keep transforming the protagonist, opening up a transference of his desire.
All this also depends on how Goblin Slayer handles its narrative structure. Can the protagonist actually enact, in the time and space of the present, the “psychodrama” of his memory of his family’s murder? Will some occasion allow him to reveal the hidden part of his bodily image and reconnect those fractured times and spaces? During the defense of the village, the work shows him acknowledging a lack in his desire for revenge for the first time: he begins to ask for help. He finds a certain joy in recognition by others. At the victory feast, the symbolic marker—his absent face—briefly “disappears” for his companions. (The disappearance of the “absent face”: in other words, its “appearance.”) In this respect, the author certainly has the ability to guide the story toward the ending of a comedy.
Conclusion
To sum up: a work contains various writing formulas, each assembled from different elements. I have proposed two structural approaches to the “revenge drama” formula: narrative structure and the structure of desire. Narrative structure examines how the fractured times and spaces of a revenge story are connected through symbolic markers, and how those markers initiate “retracing” to bring “revenge” to a focused resolution. Taking Hamlet as its starting point, the structure of desire goes further into the psychodynamic factors affecting revenge-drama characters, examining their psychic histories across those fractured times and spaces. I hope these approaches might offer a fresh perspective on analyzing works, or bring into view things some readers have overlooked.
Finally, for my beloved Master, I too should go and mourn this misguided love…8
Editor’s note: Teacher Zhong! Teacher Zhong!