Question for the gallery: Is the revenge worth taking?

[graycardinal]

ADVISORY: This is not the post you may have been looking for....

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I have, over the last few months, arguably spent more time on YouTube than one should (specifically, in a couple of specific corners of YT that are not at all relevant to the present inquiry).

However, YT being YT, it is all too easy to be lured into other corners of the videoverse in the process...

...and thus did your correspondent discover the vast yet singularly redundant swampland in which one finds AI-generated revenge-fic. Herewith a very brief description of this sea of mire, madness and muckraking for those not familiar with the concept:

Your narrator, you learn at once, has been horrifically ill-used by those around him. He (or she) may be:

• a hard-working child whose parents liked their other offspring best
• a gifted technical genius cast aside by an employer out to profit massively from their breakthrough
• a highly decorated but now-retired member of an elite or classified military unit
• a newcomer to or neighbor of an HOA ruled by a "Karen" who recognizes no authority beyond her own, who destroys all who won't submit to her will

What none of these villains realize is that their plans have been foreseen, their schemes laid bare, their crimes anticipated, their every move planned for. For just as they swoop in to claim their unjustly gained rewards, Our Hero smiles a thin, calm smile and confronts them with reality:

• the inheritance they anticipated belongs to the child they ignored
• the patents they thought they owned are in Our Hero's name
• Our Hero has bought the company from the villains under their very noses
• Our Hero's former co-workers in black ops have assembled evidence to have the villains put away (or, occasionally, neutralized the villain's Evil Empire)
• the newcomer to the neighborhood is a Senator/Mayor/Police Chief/etc. (who owns the land "Karen" has been trying to co-opt, and/or is the parent of the child they've bullied or injured)

Which is to say that the formula for these things is extremely, well, formulaic. And yet the genre garners tens of thousands of views, and is thereby (at least in theory) tremendously profitable for its creators, who have built the vids almost entirely with AI narration, a handful of still images, and a means of putting narrative text on top of the images they've used.

And there is, evidently, a market for these things, such that people are evidently making considerable money off of revenge channels nowadays.

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Which makes one wonder...

How hard would it be for a veteran fic-writer to whip out a dozen or so revenge yarns with just a little more creativity than the formulas have so far demonstrated? To download the software the current creators are using? To set up a YouTube channel of this sort of thing that would, perhaps, be just a bit more, well, creative than that now dominating the current swamp? Could one make enough money at such a game to retire, if not to the French Riviera, at least to a corner of Darkest Suburbia with better bus and train service than he has now?

Inquiring minds want to know what your humble narrator is missing in this equation....

Comments

[graycardinal]

A number of good points here and below. Among other things, I'd not want to launch (if one were going to do so) without enough material completed to sustain regular uploads for long enough to see if the audience was there, and it would be useful to discern how long it would take me to generate that much material...

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As to the transit situation: in fact, along my specific local routes I'm very minimally affected...but that's due in large part because the geography is different (there are almost no routes running near enough to one another on the west side) such that they literally can't make the kinds of reductions out here that are happening in your neighborhood without pretty much entirely cutting off service to significant segments of the suburban population. I can feel your pain in the abstract sense - having lived just off Chavez & Powell for a couple of years back when Chavez was still 39th - and it's absolutely valid pain, but from what I've seen of the overall picture, I think the cuts being made so far are as reasonable a job as can be expected in the circumstances. I attended one of the online open houses TriMet held prior to finalizing the first round of service cuts, and there was a strong sentiment there for prioritizing breadth of service (both geographical and chronological) over frequency, which was also reflected in the survey responses to the online survey they put out.

I am much afraid that things will get worse before they get better, both for transit and for local/state government services in general - because insofar as I can tell, nobody wants to admit that our present tax system(s) are as broken as our state and national legislative bodies have become. (The TriMet situation in specific is considerably aggravated by the fact that a non-trivial portion of TriMet's income derives from a long-standing, small regional payroll tax, for which a modest boost was proposed as part of ODOT's transportation budget in last year's legislature. The self-destruct sequence that's made that budget a flaming political football for the last year and a half aren't the sole cause of TriMet's budget crisis, but they're a big part of it.)

Which is as far as I think I want to get just now into the longer rant about local and state and national legislative politics, and the associated rant about what's wrong with the present taxation system, and so on, and...

Suffice to say that if the measure to open Oregon primaries - so that unaffiliated voters (like me) can vote for all the candidates irrespective of party - qualifies for the next available ballot, I'll vote for that one. (Do not get me started on the other proposed initiative reported on tonight's news, whereby it would become illegal to kill any animal for almost any reason....)

[sanguinity]

Oh, good, I'm glad you're not getting hit too hard with the transit cutbacks -- although one wishes it wasn't for such "already scraped to the bone" reasons!

And yes, I also am frustrated that we are even in this mess, and seem unable to scrape the wherewithal to get out of it.

Good luck with the stories/podcast, if you choose to pursue it!