I love the roleplaying games. In person anyway, I’m lukewarm towards online gaming. Because as much as I love the nitty gritty and shilly shally of RPGs a big part of the appeal is hanging out and being stupid with my pals. The current wave of people playing with strangers online isn’t 100% foreign to me but it isn’t my cup of eggnog. There have been times when the gang and I weren’t playing much that I sought out strangers to play D&D with, but that’s a different thing you know? That’s just about the game, it’s not a “hang”.
Most of the time these “stranger games” were a disaster but at least I got to come back to the normal crew with stories about how stupid everyone else is and how much better we are than then. Everyone enjoys that. Lately I’ve been thinking about saying to the group “hey who’s ready to endanger their family and get back to real life D&D?” But I don’t because then I would be part of the problem and I’m already a part of too many problems.
My point is while there’s not as much joshing around with the gang when playing online there’s still a little. Case in point last night someone was annoyed and saying that he wanted his character to die and come back undead for revenge on the rest of us. And to that my old pal Manitoba Saskatchewan said something about coming back from the dead and then getting someone else to get revenge for you because you couldn’t be bothered. Now that’s a funny idea.
When I invariably start another fiction blog I think I’ll call it the Lazy Revenant. A revenant as you know is someone who returns from the dead to get revenge on their murderer. The word revenant is derived from the French verb revenir, meaning “to come back”. What’s the difference between a revenant and a zombie? I’m not going to get into that because a common debate amongst people of a certain ilk is if mummies are just zombies in bandages and I won’t add to this undead racism.
A while ago there was a commercial about ancient Egyptians buying toilet paper and I hate it.
The coming back from the dead for revenge story is a standard one in horror movies although often it’s a ghost which is lame. If you’re not climbing out of your grave for vengeance you’re weak ass. Allowances will be made for spiritual possession. The quintessential revenant movie of my lifetime was the Crow. I loved that movie when I was a lad. It’s become kind of a joke (or maybe it always was and I didn’t know) if you have a character who’s a martial arts dork with a rattail and ninja stars on his wall the Crow will be his favorite movie. Other movies probably fit the bill for other people of different ages. I guess technically Jason from Friday the 13th is a revenant but his motivations are unclear. He drowned and you can’t really get revenge on water so I guess he’s just killing everyone.
The Lazy Revenant will be about some dead-eyed corporate drone who’s just coasting through life running out the clock when the murder happens. I’m thinking maybe it will be a case of mistaken identity, he wasn’t even the intended target – that’s an extra layer of how pointless existence is. So he gets gunned down by the mob (or whatever) but then he returns from the grave – for vengeance!
But here’s the deal, he wants vengeance sure, but he’s not super into it. And even if he was he doesn’t know much about vengeance. So he wants to contract out his vengeance but where do you start with that? He’s an officer worker, he doesn’t know anything about hiring assassins. Why would he? Plus is girlfriend is banging some other dude and he spends a lot of his time spying on them. “I wasn’t dead for that long Linda!”
I thought about making the Lazy Revenant a woman at first because of whatever is wrong with me (see previous blog post about that) but that would be anti-feminist because of the laziness. Also he’s not entirely sure who killed him so he tries to hire a private eye, but that aint cheap and it’s not like he was rolling in the dough when he was alive – plus once he was dead he lost all that anyway.
So somehow he’s got to get some money for this project – but without working too hard you know? So how do you monetize undeath? That’s what he’s going to have to figure out. It’s going to be humorous I tell you. And then at the end I’ll do a reverse Sixth Sense and the twist will be that he was alive the whole time! And then most of what came before will suddenly be nonsensical. But that’s fine because who’s going to read it anyway? Nobody that’s who. Whom? Who.
Rocket Cat 