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Or from his POV: He’s an accountant, he’s not used to violence. He at first yields to the antagonist’s every demand, he’s terrified. Then when he realizes he has no out and his family is threatened, he doesn’t get angry and turns into the badass he was in a previous life like in those movies, he just sheepishly starts researching murder on the internet (not on his own computer, he’s not stupid). He commits murder like he would fix his own toilet: at first bumbling and disgusted, then relieved and proud of his accomplishment.
Meanwhile the bad guys assume literally anyone else murdered their accomplice. But for some reason they keep hassling him. By the fifth murder he’s become so blasé about the whole process that his cover is starting to slip (“Sure, I’ll pay you off, no problem, I love my family, I don’t want any trouble. Meet me in the middle of the forest with two large garbage bags and a shovel“).
This would be great too. Just any pro-social introvert normal guy who is just intelligent. Once there's a devastating event in his life like the murder of a loved one he just sits down on the couch for 12 hours thinking. Then there's research through a public wireless via TOR/VPN and a cheap laptop paid in cash. Then baddies start dropping.
There was a comment about gangbangers on The Wire recently. Would be cool to see something perpendicular.
Revenge is a morally fraught motivation, though. I’d like him to be completely in the clear morally: it’s both unambigous self-defense, and the bad guys are evil. The reason why a scenario like that is rare in fiction, is that society considers the use of violence, especially killing, to corrupt one’s soul. I don’t agree: just because we have delegated the killing to cops and soldiers, doesn’t mean we can remain clean. The blood they spill is on our hands too.
Society recognizes three categories: the innocent sheep, and then the violent, which are separated into two: evil wolves and somewhat good shepherd dogs (or as Team america puts it: pussies, assholes, and dicks). In all those movies you mentioned, the badass protagonists have been corrupted by their violence previously, they’re dogs in sheep’s clothing at the beginning, they are not like the viewer. I’d like the accountant to be, and to remain, a sheep. With bloody teeth.
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