Just finished rewatching Maleficent and damn I forgot revenge is bad narratives can be good.
Like, ultimately the formula they follow is person A gets hurt by person B (often scarred for life/grievously injured) -> person B moves on and starts a family - A becomes bitter and angry and gets back at B -> but eventually decides not to go through with it because B has a family/it would make them just as bad, or they do and then feel empty/it’s unfulfilling.
And I hate it. I hate that the implication is that if you hurt the person who hurt you, you are just as bad as them. I much prefer the Inigo Montoya route: revenge is my purpose because someone did something bad to me -> I get revenge and this is great, I have achieved my goal.
And I could never pinpoint why that was the case until I was rewatching Maleficent with my sib and realized that it’s because most “revenge is bad” narratives center around the harm it will cause to person B. It centers around the harm it causes to the bully, the abuser, the perpetrator. It centers around B’s family, B’s friends. It never centers around A.
Maleficent, though, does center around A in a way I don’t see too often. Maleficent got hurt by Stephen. Stephen moves on, while Maleficent can’t. Maleficent becomes bitter and angry, and gets back at Stephen via cursing Aurora. Then Maleficent decides not to go through with it/regrets it.
But Maleficent makes the choice after. After Aurora wakes up, Stephen attacks Maleficent. He burns her, he chains her. Maleficent escapes, and then she doesn’t continue attacking Stephen. She throws him on the ground, moves to leave, he grabs her near her wings(the main source of her trauma and mirroring when he hurt her) and she pins him up against the wall. She can choose to kill him.
She doesn’t. And it’s a culmination of her healing, that she moves on. She leaves Stephen behind. And he can’t accept that, so in the end, he causes his own death.
It’s beautiful because it’s clear Maleficent is a victim, it centers around her trauma and her healing. Maleficent choosing not to kill him isn’t that it’s bad to get back at Stephen, that he doesn’t deserve death, it’s about the fact that she doesn’t want anything to do with him. He’s irrelevant.
And there’s the fact that he suffers, which is nice to see. But his obsession is another post. As is the parallels between this movie because I could rave all night about that.