Disproportionate Retribution/Literature: Difference between revisions

* In [[Diana Wynne Jones]]' ''[[The Magids|The Merlin Conspiracy]]'', due to some inadvertent time hopping as he flees an assassin sent by two big bads who want him dead for no discernible reason, Nick winds up in the assassin's home before the hit was taken up. A little over a decade, in fact. The two big bads pay a visit as the children they were, and Nick {{spoiler|laughs as one steps on an egg,}} which sets off the two's berserk button and triggers the need for revenge years later.

** During the same interlude, Nick {{spoiler|hangs up on the assassin's ex-wife in the middle of a phone call, which sets in motion her ultimate plot to take over Britain and destroy its other magic-users before they could oppose her.}} Without which the rest of the book probably wouldn't have happened anyway.

** This was however an [[Truth in Television|accurate reflection]] of the French justice system at the time.

*** One should keep in mind his actual crime, he broke glass (back when it was probably worth hundreds or thousands of times the value of the bread), was armed, and robbed an occupied residence. Which is an easy felony (actually multiple felonies) that will put you away for a long time under the American legal system. With escape attempts using violence and fleeing a felony, and resisting recapture, it is entirely likely he would never get out under, say the American common law legal system. Not of hard labor of course, but still...

**** Of course, his number of escape attempts had a lot to do with the horrific prison conditions, which complicates the issue of Valjean's sentence then versus now.

** The Redwaller kids point out immediately afterwards that Asmodeus's poison corrupted his mind and made him go batshit crazy into ''thinking'' that the Redwallers were responsible, even though he decided to steal everything valuable in the abbey after they'd saved him from death.

* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' has a number of examples. Gregor Clegane typically crushes anything that so much as annoys him. He most notably held his little brother's face to a burning brazier for playing with one of his old toys, scarring him for life. Petyr Baelish's kingdom-conquering is mostly due to a grudge he nurses from being rejected by his childhood sweetheart for a wealthier and more dashing man. Tywin Lannister is well known for his harsh retribution. A popular song, "The Rains of Castamere" was written about how he completely wiped out two noble houses for being disloyal. The Freys have possibly the most shocking example: {{spoiler|After Robb Stark reneges on his wedding promise to House Frey, Lord Walder massacres Robb, his mother, most of his noble bannermen, and most of his army at the wedding feast of his uncle, thereafter called The Red Wedding.}} Joffrey Baratheon/Lannister is also know for this trope, typically cutting everybody's heads off for any act of defiance or making them duel to the death. He once even almost executed a person for getting a little bit too drunk and dishonouring himself in a tourney.

** In the first book, the staff taking care of the tomb of Darken Rahl's father were executed if a single petal fell off the flowers there or a single torch went out in Rahl's presence. And he considered himself merciful for allowing them a quick death in such cases.

** The Bondsmagi love disproportionate revenge. The reason everybody respects them is because killing one will get the entire guild after you to kill you, your family, your pets, etc. They're also known for burning an entire city to ash because a dozen of them died during a war against the Therin Empire.

* [[Michael Crichton]]'s ''[[Timeline]]'' has Robert Doniger, the business-man who sends the heroes back in time to the Middle Ages to fix something gone wrong. Long story short, lots of things go wrong. When our heroes ''do'' get back, they get their revenge on Doniger, unethical as he is, by {{spoiler|sending him back in time with the same machine to the Middle Ages where he gets a nasty case of the ''Black Plague''.}}

* One villain in the ''[[Fingerprints]]'' series got her [[Start of Darkness]] when she vowed revenge on the person who murdered her mother. Upon learning that the murderer had already died for unrelated reasons, she decided that wasn't satisfactory - someone had to ''suffer'', and it didn't particularly matter who. She began targeting the hero (who was related to the murderer but didn't even ''know'' about the murder, let alone take part in it). Unusually, the villain is eventually persuaded by the hero that what she's doing is pointless... but only because she finds another target more directly connected to her mother's murder, whom she proceeds to go after with great enthusiasm.

* ''The Judgment'', the short story written by [[Franz Kafka]], has a man's father reveal that he is aware that the son has been lying to an old friend living in Russia ([[Mind Screw|who may or may not exist]]) about his engagement. The father then orders the son to drown himself. The son ''does so''.

** The ending of ''Chamber of Secrets'' in the film version is formidable. Harry makes Lucius Malfoy lose his slave. Which is a disproportionately '''minor''' retribution when you remember that he caused a young girl to be mind-raped, and tried to organize the murder of every Muggle-born child in Hogwarts. Lucius then falls head-first into this trope by trying to murder Harry with [[Death Ray|the ever-dreaded AK-666]]. [[Throw It In|Of course, it just happened to come into the actor's head during filming; the actual script said something along the lines of "LUCIUS yells a curse to fire at HARRY, who dodges." Nowhere in the script did it have Lucius explicitly yell "Avada Kedavra!"]]

** There's also the treatment Harry received from the Dursleys for most of the eleven years prior to his acceptance into Hogwarts, and occasionally afterward as well. He was confined to the cupboard under the stairs pretty much just for existing, yelled at for asking questions or innocently mentioning strange dreams, and punished (up to and including being denied meals) for exhibiting signs of the hated magic, which he neither understood nor was able to control. For example, in the first book he gets locked in the cupboard for much of the summer just for talking to a snake after the "vanishing glass" incident.

* [[Tom Clancy]]'s ''Without Remorse'' has the ''hero'', [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge|after his girlfriend is brutally killed, decide to start killing any drug dealer he runs across, on his way to finding the real killers]].

** Lest we forget, Clark at one point managed to kidnap one of the dealers who killed his girlfriend (and [[Complete Monster|bragged about it]] [[Too Dumb to Live|to Clark]]). He shoved him in a boat and drove back to his island home, leased from the Navy and stocked with all kinds of surplus gear. Like a ''pressurization chamber!!'' For the next ten hours, he uses it to put his captive at around 100 feet simulated depth, and to raise it when [[Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique|the man didn't answer his questions properly]]. By the time Clark had finished, every joint in the man's body was crippled, [[Eye Scream|the insides of his eyes had burst]], most of his muscles were for all intents and purposes one giant bruise, and he had the next best thing to a stroke. When finished, he drove the man back to the mainland and left him on the beach for the police to find: Blind, incoherent, and crippled, spending the next month in agony before finally dying.

** Roughly two thirds of ''Sum of All Fears'' is about Elizabeth Elliot trying to ruin Ryan's career and marriage for taking offense to ''her'' bad manners in the previous book. The movie version is vastly improved by the fact that she isn't in it.

* In ''[[Altered Carbon]]'', [[Ax Crazy|Takeshi]] [[Crapsack World|Kovacs]] is placed into a torture program for 24 simulated hours by some [[Punch Clock Villain]] technicians hired by the [[Big Bad]]. After he escapes, he remembers a passage from his favorite author about making every struggle personal. He returns to the technicians' office and kills everyone who works there, then goes to a strip club that is tangentially related to the affair and massacres everyone working there as well. He melts the heads of everyone he kills, preventing them from being resurrected in a new body, as most people are after death. His rampage is considered outrageous by everyone who learns about it.

* In ''[[Holes]]'', every member of the Yelnats family and their descendants are cursed with bad luck because one of their ancestors, Elya Yelnats, forgot to fulfill a promise to Madame Zeroni. The promise? All he had to do was carry her up a mountain, and sing a certain song while she drank from the spring on the top.

** Admittedly, the spring apparently had some sort of healing/growth properties that would have given the old and possibly dying Zeroni a longer life. Still a bit harsh, though.

** [[Fridge Brilliance|And it did help her descendent in the long run.]]

* A race introduced by [[Timothy Zahn]] in the ''[[Hand of Thrawn]]'' duology have this as part of their legal code. The penalty for murder is death, life for life - either one who is guilty, or ten of his clan who are innocent. They use this to justify flattening a Bothan space station and further inflaming the political mess engulfing the New Republic.

** The bothans themselves. A species had a single member slight the bothan race, and in retaliation, they burned the homeworld, slaughtered every member of the species, erased records of them, and '''Made them never have existed.'''

* In [[Ray Bradbury]]'s short story ''The Flying Machine'', a Chinese emperor {{spoiler|beheads the bewildered inventor of the titular machine, has the machine burned along with the inventor's remains, and has the ashes buried secretly}}, all because someone ''might'' be inspired to use such a machine to destroy the Great Wall of China.

* In ''[[Romance of the Three Kingdoms]]'', Cao Cao responds to the death of his father at the hands of one of Tao Qian's officers by committing a genocide against Tao's subjects.

* A lot of characters in Maggie Furey's ''[[Shadowleague]]'' trilogy teeter on the brink of this, but as of the first book (''The Heart of Myrial''), only one character has gone over - intending torture, rape and murder for a noble who seems perfectly unaware that her grunts (who have already died for their crimes) were committing said crimes, and killing whatever innocent bystanders stand in his way.

** Grzylov from ''Air Battle Force'' loses a baseful of bombers when Patrick has them destroyed to stop them attacking Turkmenistan. His response in ''Plan of Attack''? {{spoiler|Nuclear sneak attacks that wipe out most of the American strategic arsenal.}}

** In ''Executive Intent'', Somali pirates attack a Chinese ship. At first, the Chinese helicopter sent tries to warn them off. When the pirates start killing hostages, the helicopter crew respond by attacking the pirates. Fair enough. Then the helicopter is shot down by a pirate. The Chinese response is a massive aerial and amphibious attack and takeover of Mogadishu. Later, some Yemeni terrorists crash an explosive-laden boat into a Chinese warship, sinking it. The Chinese proceed to punish Yemen too.

* In the [[Farsala Trilogy]], a young smith named Kavi loses the use of his hand when a deghan tries to grab a sword from him. Years later, he betrays Farsala to the Hrum and causes the death of the entire deghan class.

* Lady Holdless Thella of ''[[Dragonriders of Pern|Renegades of Pern]]'' lives and breathes this trope. In one case, she and her raiders ambush a trading caravan, destroying several carts and killing or wounding most of the traders and their beasts. She does this because earlier, when she was chasing down a family running from her, she encountered the traders, and the man she questioned was evasive and unhelpful.

* Done a great deal in ~Aesop's Fables~. One particularly harsh example is in the story of the monkey and the camel. The monkey danced for all the desert animals and amused them with how nimble and cute he was. The camel saw this and figured that he could do just as well. He showed off, trying to dance as well, but of course was much clumsier and oafish. The animals were so annoyed at his terrible dancing that they drove him out of the desert, and then ate him, "serving refreshments of camel humps and ribs". [[Nightmare Fuel|Ow.]]

* In Andy Hoare's [[White Scars]] novel ''Hunt for Voldorius'', Malya is chosen for Voldorius's equerry. They get her to obey by threatening to kill a hundred people every time she is disobedient.

** Earlier on in the story, the Dog immediately tells the Cat that they can never be friends again ''just because the Cat didn't want to come along on his exploration trip.'' Really, it's not all that hard to see why the Cat would prefer not to retain too close a relationship with such jerks.

* Nearly the entire class on the 30th floor in ''[[Wayside School]]'' fell victim to this trope courtesy of [[Sadist Teacher|Mrs. Gorf]], who would turn her entire class into apples for minor offenses such as sneezing, saying "God bless you" after said sneeze, crying, and arriving late for class.

* [[Complete Monster|Achilles]] from the [[Ender's Game|Ender's Shadow]] series takes this to an extreme by killing people for doing ''good'' things to ''help him'' because he can't bear for anyone to have seen him helpless.

** Arguably, Carrera's {{spoiler|nuking the city}} to get at the family of the terrorist organization's leader also qualifies, considering earlier in ''Carnifex'' it was shown that his people could get at the family members with more selective means of killing.

* In [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s ''The Cask of Amontillado'', the narrator, Montressor, is insulted by Fortunato prior to the beginning of the story. While it isn't said what the insult is, apparently it wasn't so severe that Fortunato thought their friendship was dissolved. In any case, it's difficult to imagine that he could have done anything that would make {{spoiler|walling him up in a wine cellar and leaving him to die of dehydration}} anything but disproportionate.

* In ''[[Daemon|Freedom]]'', [[Heroic Sociopath|Loki/Gragg]] ruins the credit rating of someone fool enough to cut his queue.

* The captain of the Albatross in the ''[[Knight and Rogue Series]]'' has Michael flogged for accidentally spilling paint on him. Bonus points for Michael not having been the one to spill the paint in the first place.

* In an example of disproportionately low retribution, the head inquisitor in the ''[[Safehold]]'' novels gives orders that result in a massacre and is sentenced to one week's kitchen duty.

* In ''The Highland Twins at the [[Chalet School]]'', when Fiona McDonald makes a snarky comment at Betty Wynne-Davies, Betty responds by planning to steal the Chart of Erisay, a document containing military information about the remote Scottish island where the McDonalds live. She then makes a deal with a Nazi spy to hand it over to him, after he hears her talking about it and corners her. When news gets back to the school and police are called in, Betty winds up being expelled.

** More generally, one way to guarantee getting punished in the Chalet School, usually by fines and a heavy ticking off, is...''talking slang''. Yeah.

 

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