APPLICATION: LUCETI ♠ "None of your fuckin' business."
PLAYER
Name: Sora.
Journal Username:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cinnamonical
E-mail: alchymic.aria @ gmail
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cinnamonical
Current Characters at Luceti: N/A.
CHARACTER
Name: Revy. (real name: Rebecca; nickname: Two Hand)
Canon: Black Lagoon.
Gender: Female.
Age: Unspecified; probably early 20s.
Wing Color: Blood red.
Canon Point: After the end of the El Baile de la Muerte arc (chapter 76, vol. 9).
Canon Point Explanation: It's the last completed arc of the series thus far. The mangaka has started another one, but his updates since then have been very, very spotty. While the most recent chapters of the manga do contain some interesting moments for Revy (we see just how scarily "protective" she can be of Rock), at their core they're just elaboration and confirmation of things we've seen from her already.
History: Although much of Revy's history prior to the series remains shrouded in shadow, she's arguably the member of the Lagoon Company about whom we have the most background (surpassing even Rock, the "main" protagonist -- although not by much, really). Originally from Manhattan's Chinatown, Revy entered the criminal world at a very young age. The timeline isn't clear, but it's known that she dropped out of school in the middle of junior high; that she once had an encounter with a group of corrupt cops who ganged up on her for a crime she didn't commit just because she was "a little chink bitch with no power," and her very first murder may have been out of self-defense or revenge against one of them; that she was armed on the streets with both cigarettes and a gun, practicing her aim against empty aluminum cans when she wasn't stealing, killing, or doing other "vile crap"; and that she was arrested and jailed at some point, but escaped (leaving behind outstanding warrants in the NYPD's 27th precinct) and made her way to Roanapur, where Dutch hired her on as part of the Lagoon Traders and where she may have picked up (or refined) the "two-handed" gunslinging style she's now noted for. It's also when she acquired her trademark weapons, the custom Beretta 92Fs that she calls the "Praiyachat Sword Cutlass Specials," or simply just her "cutlasses."
Revy debuts right at the beginning of the series, from Rock's point-of-view as he's staring at both Revy and Dutch from the business ends of their guns. It's nothing personal, of course. It's just that Rock has something that the Lagoon Traders had been sent to "pick up" -- a disk from his company, Asahi Heavy Industries -- and they needed to double-check that he didn't have anything else on him. Dutch is satisfied that Rock has nothing more to offer them, and so lets him and the crew of the ship he was on go. Revy has other plans: she takes Rock hostage with the intent of extorting ransom money from his company as a supplement to the money they're already getting for the job. Unfortunately, Asahi doesn't deem him worth saving and asks him to "perish in the South China Sea for us." Not long after, the Lagoon Traders are ambushed by a helicopter manned by mercenaries hired by Asahi to ensure exactly that fate. Rock turns the tables on them when he directs Dutch to launch their boat into the air to get close enough to fire off one of the torpedos still attached to the deck, thereby destroying the helicopter. With that out of the way, the Lagoon Traders return to shore and hand the disk over to their client, the Russian mob queen Balalaika. Rock's boss also happens to be on the scene, given that he's in negotiations with Balalaika over the fate of the disk. He offers Rock his job back, but Rock turns it down on the basis that they've already declared him dead. Revy invites him to join the Lagoon Traders instead.
The company's next job has them sailing out to pick up some embezzled goods, but (pardon the potential meme) it's a trap, set up by a disgruntled former client who didn't like that Lagoon Traders was willing to do jobs for Balalaika. Aside from the unpleasant surprise of being suddenly attacked on what was thought to be a routine job, things end cleanly enough with Revy easily taking out every single boat in the enemy fleet by herself and the mastermind behind the scheme getting himself blown up by Balalaika. Mainly, this arc is notable for being the first time readers hear anything significant about Revy's dark past. She tells Rock that she's been killing and stealing and "[doing] all sorts of vile crap" since she was a kid, but that "[her] story ain't worth shit" anyway.
Things get considerably more heated when the Lagoon Traders are hired to "transport" 12-year-old Garcia Lovelace, an aristocratic heir from Venezuela who was kidnapped by Manisalera cartel members as part of a ploy to "convince" Garcia's father to sell them his estate. Garcia himself isn't the problem -- it's the Lovelace family maid that is. Roberta, a former FARC guerilla soldier and trained assassin, is intensely devoted to the well-being of the Lovelaces out of gratitude for taking her in, and so when she shows up in Roanapur to get Garcia back, chaos ensues. The Yellow Flag (a local dive bar) as well as the Lagoon Traders' car get shot up, and Revy engages Roberta in a one-on-one fight out of revenge for getting shot by her earlier. Balalaika eventually arrives to announce that Hotel Moscow (the Russian mafia that she leads in Roanapur) has crushed the Manisalera cartel both locally and back in Venezuela, thereby rendering the fact of Garcia's kidnapping rather moot in the entire scheme of things. This does nothing to quell the hostility between Revy and Roberta, leading Dutch to suggest that the two women simply duke it out with their fists until they feel they've settled things. And it gets settled, all right...with Revy knocked out cold.
The series dives deeper into Revy's past -- and her character -- when she and Rock head into the ocean in order to retrieve a forgotten painting for their client from the bottom of a wrecked German submarine from WW2. Revy brushes off Rock's question about what the people who died in the sub were thinking before they died, accusing him of "get[ting] off on being gloomy" and saying that "thinking about shit like that won't do you any good." Later, when Rock tries to dissuade Revy from taking some Iron Crosses and other memorabilia to pawn off for cash, she lectures him on his sentimentality, revealing that the two things in the world she puts the most value on are money and guns. She also says that if Rock ever tries to moralize to her again, she'll kill him.
Revy and Rock return to the boat empty-handed thanks to members of the Aryan Socialist Union snatching the painting from them at the last moment. Dutch takes Revy with him that night to retrieve the painting, but gets momentarily sidetracked when he has to stop an upset, unsettled Revy from shooting up uninvolved civilians. They eventually make their way to Rachmann, leader of the Aryan Socialist Union, where they find out via phone that the client who initially hired them for this job also happens to be a Nazi -- one from Germany's old guard. Sir Alfred sent both the Lagoon Traders and the ASU to retrieve the painting, serving both as insurance for retrieving it as well as a test of the ASU's worthiness to receive patronage from the client. Needless to say, the ASU failed spectacularly. After Revy toys with Rachmann a little, she and Dutch shoot him dead.
As the two of them wait for Benny and Rock to come pick them up, Dutch once again scolds Revy for losing her cool earlier, saying that it's fine if she doesn't want to talk about whatever was bothering her, but she has to remember that her actions will affect him and his business as the boss of the Lagoon Traders. Revy opens up a little, saying that it's not that she doesn't like Rock, but it bothers her that Rock is so obviously not from "their" world of lawlessness, and because of that, she "can't work with him."
The incidental antagonism between Rock and Revy comes to a head after a day of odd jobs, the last of which involved Revy receiving a mild lecture from a client for being too trigger-happy. Rock brings up said lecture as a rebuttal in conversation while he and Revy are hanging out at an outdoor restaurant. He also asks if Revy's constant bad mood throughout their job runs is due to their conversation inside the submarine. Revy tells him to shut up, but instead of backing down, Rock says (twice, even) that he's not going to apologize to her for anything he's said or done so far. Furious, Revy draws her gun and pulls the trigger right at point-blank range, but miraculously Rock escapes a head wound by shoving the gun aside and then yanking it from Revy's grip. He then proceeds to verbally shred her for being a "shallow tightwad and a dick" that he has to kiss up to as well as being a self-centered hypocrite who refuses to get to know others yet complains when others don't understand her. But the real reason Rock is hung up on her attitude is because it reminds him of the "scum" and the rat race he left behind in Japan, and he doesn't want to hear that from the girl who taught him that there was a better way to live than as a cog in a corporate machine. Stumped for a moment, Revy falls back on flinging insults at Rock, though much more half-heartedly than before. (For a certain definition of "half-heartedly," anyway.) Their fight is interrupted by corrupt local policeman Chief Watsap, who takes both Rock and Revy into custody to do regulation paperwork in order to smooth the incident over. In the police car, Revy asks Rock what side he's on, to which Rock responds that he's on "his own ground...and nowhere else." After a moment, Revy asks for a light for her cigarette, and Rock shares his already-lit cigarette with her.
Revy's role in the manhunt for the homicidal Romanian twins Hansel and Gretel is fairly minimal. She joins Eda in chasing them down, getting closer to the twins than any of the other bounty hunters, but end up ultimately losing out due to Hotel Moscow being dead-set on avenging their fallen brethren by killing both of the twins. Balalaika and her snipers only manage to kill Hansel at first; Gretel escapes long enough to get the Lagoon Traders to transport her to safety. While in transit, Gretel, having had her first taste of true kindness and compassion from Rock, attempts to "thank" him by dropping her pants and flashing Rock, causing Rock to flee the room in bewilderment and frustration. Revy storms into the room and punches Gretel as retaliation, threatening to kill the girl herself if Gretel ever "mess[es] with Rock again." The rest of the trip continues with no such incident, setting up for a reasonably "happy" ending that is soon shattered by Hotel Moscow's hired gun, who kills Gretel just as she steps off the boat to leave.
She takes more of the spotlight in the "Goat, Jihad, Rock 'n Roll" arc, heading an impromptu operation to rescue Rock from terrorists who have taken him hostage due to believing that he held documents regarding an upcoming attack masterminded by Hezbollah. In truth, Revy had the documents herself all along, but told Shenhua and Leigharch (their hired help for the job, courtesy of the Triad leader Mr. Chang) otherwise in order to get them to go along with rescuing Rock before delivering the documents to Chang's CIA contact, who strangely enough appears to know Revy from her Manhattan days. Lest anyone think she's getting soft, Revy bashes Rock in the head after he thanks her for her help, insisting that she's never going risk herself for him ever again. This is a complete lie, considering that she follows Rock to Japan as his bodyguard when he gets hired by Balalaika to be her interpreter during her meetings with the Washimine Group, a yakuza family who wants Hotel Moscow's help in fighting back against their former allies, the Kousa Kai.
Not all the drama with her in Tokyo involves gunfights, however. While at a New Years' street fair, Revy suggests to Rock that he visit his family while he still can. It's not just referring to physical proximity: once he reaches a certain point of saturation in the criminal lifestyle (e.g., being arrested), he won't be able to show his face to them anymore. Rock says that he's not really on good terms with his family, but Revy brushes it off, saying that at least they raised him legit. There's a rare wistful expression from her as she says this, but it quickly evaporates when she attempts to shoot down her last target at a game booth and fails because it's loaded with a weight. At this point, the two of them meet another street vendor (and its unofficial peacekeeper), Ginji Matsuzaki, and Yukio Washimine, a schoolgirl whose father used to own the booth that Ginji now keeps (and who, unknown to Rock and Revy at the time, was the previous boss of the Washimine Group). As Yukio and Rock talk, Revy has her own "conversation" with Ginji. The two can't understand each other thanks to the language barrier, but nevertheless both of them recognize in the other a kindred soul -- someone "reek[ing] of the stench of blood and guts." Readers find out in another scene that Ginji used to be a feared assassin working for the Washimine Group known as "Manslayer Ginji."
Later in their stay, Revy is seen sitting on a park bench waiting for Rock to come back from visiting his family. She passes the time watching some kids play at a nearby playground, but their mock gunfights only make her remember her younger days in Manhattan, shooting at cans near Mott and Canal. She's snapped out of her reverie when a stray shot from one of the popguns nicks her in the shoulder. Initially enraged, she ends up gleefully showing off her sharpshooting skills to the kids with one of their popguns. Soon she's even horsing around with them in their little Western role-play. It takes a serious turn when Revy shows them the "proper" way to die from a gunshot, but once she realizes Rock has been watching her with the kids for a while already, she gets up, drags him off, and makes him promise to never tell anyone about what he just saw.
Revy accompanies Rock to a meeting with Hotel Moscow and the Washimine Group. Though she remains in the background of the meeting like a good bodyguard should, she nevertheless catches the eye of Chaka, one of Washimine's enforcers. After the meeting, as she's waiting for Balalaika to finish socializing, Chaka hits on Revy, boasting about having killed ten men. Unsurprisingly, Revy is not impressed, and tell him (quite literally) that he smells. It's then that Rock returns to fetch her, since Balalaika and the rest of Hotel Moscow are leaving. Chaka doesn't take kindly to Rock's interruption; he proceeds to beat him bloody right in front of Revy, all for the purpose of trying to get Revy to draw her gun. Thankfully, the rest of the Washimine members appear in the hallway just then and step in to stop Chaka. Nevertheless, Revy tells Rock that she's going to need him to get her "cutlasses" from Roanapur, as a defensive measure against Chaka wanting to get into a fight with her.
Things get ugly between Hotel Moscow and the Washimine Group in a different way, as well. The acting boss of Washimine, Tsugio Bando, is so incensed by Balalaika's ruthless methods of intimidation that one night he attempts to kill her himself. But Balalaika effortlessly overpowers him, snapping his neck. Because of a certain agreement with the Kousa Council, this forces Yukio -- as the only direct descendent of the Washimine line -- to become the new true boss of the group. As the Washimine Group prepares to defend itself against Hotel Moscow and its reinforcements, Rock begs Revy to come with him to see Yukio so they can talk. At first, Revy scoffs at this, reminding Rock that the both of them are technically Yukio's enemies now, and that he should stay out of the mess for his own good. However, she softens almost right afterwards, saying that as his bodyguard, her job is to protect his life, not tell him how to live it.
When they arrive at the Washimine residence, Revy instantly senses that something's off. She storms in with her guns drawn, but the place is empty except for the corpse of Yoshida (another high-ranking Washimine officer). Revy examines Yoshida's corpse, and concludes that, based on the nature of the exit wound as well as the lack of casings on the floor, Yoshida was likely shot by Chaka, who wields a large caliber revolver. The two of them are soon joined by an irate Ginji, who's under the impression that Rock and Revy were responsible for Yoshida's death and Yukio's abduction. Rock smooths things over with Ginji, explaining that he and Revy only came to get Yukio out of harm's way. The four of them track the perpetrators down to a local bowling alley.
At the bowling alley, Revy and Ginji crash Chaka's "party" together, gunning down his goons. Chaka escapes from the two with Yukio, but Rock (who came in from the back) knocks him out temporarily with a bowling pin and takes Yukio with him. After Revy finishes "cleaning up" her area of the bowling alley, she manages to find a now-recovered Chaka, witnessing him shooting his own men after they try to escape. Gleeful at meeting her again, Chaka tries to start a Western-style gun duel with her, but she greets him with a flying kick to his face instead, saying that while she'd love to kill him herself, she isn't interested if he's going to make it easy for her. Revy lures Chaka to the pool before standing back to let Ginji have it out with him. Ginji effortlessly defeats Chaka in four moves, the first of which involves slicing a bullet in half with his katana. Then he slices off the barrel of Chaka's gun and then Chaka's hand itself before simply shoving Chaka into the pool with the hilt of his sword. Revy spits on him as he drowns, and Ginji shoves Chaka under with his now sheathed blade. Afterwards, Revy tries to goad Ginji into a fight with her, wanting to test his skill now that she's seen him in action, but Ginji says that if she's lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be), they'll get a chance to duke it out one-on-one.
At the bowling alley, Revy and Ginji crash Chaka's "party" together, gunning down his goons. Chaka escapes from the two with Yukio, but Rock (who came in from the back) knocks him out temporarily with a bowling pin and takes Yukio with him. After Revy finishes "cleaning up" her area of the bowling alley, she manages to find a now-recovered Chaka, witnessing him shooting his own men after they try to escape. Gleeful at meeting her again, Chaka tries to start a Western-style gun duel with her, but she greets him with a flying kick to his face instead, saying that while she'd love to kill him herself, she isn't interested if he's going to make it easy for her. Revy lures Chaka to the pool before standing back to let Ginji have it out with him. Ginji effortlessly defeats Chaka in four moves, the first of which involves slicing a bullet in half with his katana. Then he slices off the barrel of Chaka's gun and then Chaka's hand itself before simply shoving Chaka into the pool with the hilt of his sword. Revy spits on him as he drowns, and Ginji shoves Chaka under with his now sheathed blade. Afterwards, Revy tries to goad Ginji into a fight with her, wanting to test his skill now that she's seen him in action, but Ginji says that if she's lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be), they'll get a chance to duke it out one-on-one. With Chaka and his men all dead, the four of them go their separate ways.
Revy's next test as Rock's bodyguard is to protect him from, of all people, his own boss for the moment: Balalaika herself. When Rock finds out that Balalaika is considering a new business partnership with the Kousa Council in addition to wiping out the Washimine Group, he tries to persuade her otherwise. Balalaika responds by grabbing Rock by the collar, shoving him up against a car, and pointing her gun at him. In a panic, Revy whips out her own weapons, aiming one at Balalaika and one at Balalaika's second-in-command, Boris. She demands that Balalaika put her gun down, but the other woman only says that even though she doesn't know what's going on, Revy shouldn't "wish for a life like [Rock's]." Just when it seems like he's talked himself into a corner, Rock manages to amuse Balalaika enough to get her to holster her gun. This doesn't placate Revy, who says that she can protect him through any sort of trials life might throw their way, but "there's no way of protecting somebody who just can't wait to die." And if were anyone else but Rock involved, she would have already "popped off a few rounds." Rock apologizes, and asks Revy to come back with him to his town.
As they're sitting together on a park bench, Revy reflects on Balalaika's words. She says that because Tokyo is such a nice place, it made her forget that she's not cut out to live anywhere else but "places where the air's always dirty." She wishes Rock a farewell, thinking that he's going to leave the criminal life behind, but Rock says that he didn't come back to stay: he came back to forget his old life for good. Just then, the kids that Revy met earlier come up to her and ask her to show off her sharpshooting again. Revy does so -- with her actual guns this time. With a slightly cynical grin, she tells the kids to go back home to their mothers.
After Balalaika "talks" with the Kousa Kai (read: kills 'em all), Revy roars up on a motorcycle to give Rock a ride to Hotel Moscow's boat before the entire town is completely sealed off thanks to Balalaika's actions. Rock, however, insists on meeting with Yukio and Ginji in order to tell them that Balalaika has officially pardoned the Washimine Group. When the two meet up again, Yukio says that she cannot trust the word of Balalaika, and that furthermore, honor demands that she take vengeance on Hotel Moscow for Bando's death. With negotiations at an impasse, Revy and Ginji step up to physically settle the matter. The two fighters become locked in a violent stalemate, which ends when Ginji becomes distracted by the memory of something Yukio said to him earlier. Revy takes advantage of the moment to shoot him point-blank in the forehead. As Rock comes by to dress Revy's wounds, Yukio picks up Ginji's fallen katana and holds it to her throat, stating her intent to clear the slate with her act of suicide. Revy begs Rock not to watch, warning that he's going to scar him, but Rock doesn't look away as Yukio slices her own throat and falls on top of Ginji's corpse. Not long after, Revy and Rock return to Roanapur.
The Lagoon Traders get caught up in protecting a counterfeiter named Janet "Jane" Bhai after she accidentally gets on the bad side of her most recent client, the Girolamo crime family from Florida, who have hired a "carnival of killers" to hunt her down. The arc ends with the Lagoon Traders' dock getting destroyed in the resulting firefight, but they have bigger problems to worry about when the killer maid Roberta returns to Roanapur, dead-set on revenge for the death of her master, Diego Lovelace. Consequently, Garcia Lovelace and another maid named Fabiola are also in Roanapur, to ask Rock for his help in finding Roberta. Revy and the rest of the Lagoon Traders want no part in the mess, particularly since Roberta's target is essentially the United States military. However, Eda convinces Revy that Rock is going to need someone to at least "let him know which way the wind's blowing," especially because if he messes this up, it's not just him that's going to be in trouble -- it's everyone in Roanapur who benefits from not having the US sights trained on them. At the very least, Revy needs to be his "street cred," since Rock is so wholesome-looking that no one in Roanapur is going to give him the information he needs in making sure things don't completely blow up.
When Rock tries to get Revy's help, she reveals that one of her issues with him at the moment is that he tends to jump headfirst into problematic situations without ever thinking how she is going to deal with it, like he did in Japan. Revy says that if she's going to follow him into things like that, she needs to know "how [she] can live with what [Rock] do[es]." Rock explains that if Revy is a "gun," as she once said back in Japan, then he's a bullet, and a bullet is useless unless it's being fired from a gun. Afterwards, Revy gives him an actual bullet before setting off to see some contacts, like the gunsmith Praiyachat and the explosives expert Toh Chi. In her reconnaissance, she finds out that Roberta's going to have "help" from other mercenaries, so she calls up Shenhua (and by association, Sawyer and Lotton from the "carnival of killers") to deal with them, along with soldiers hired by a Colombian cartel that also wants Roberta dead. In between the fighting, Revy takes the time to try to "mentor" Fabiola in her own way, telling Fabiola that if she wants to bring Roberta and Garcia back with her to Venezuela, she can't afford to take the moral high road in a place like Roanapur.
Eventually, Revy and her crew run into Roberta herself, but manage to escape more-or-less unharmed when Roberta sees Fabiola and momentarily lapses back into her kinder "maid" persona with her before walking past the group. Seeing that Fabiola was unable to make Roberta snap out of her vengeful mindset, they go searching for Garcia (who got separated earlier from the group), and find him with two American soldiers. They prepare to take the soldiers down, but they're intercepted by Balalaika and her soldiers, who are determined to get the Americans out of Roanapur alive and have no compunctions about destroying anything that prevents that outcome, including friendly acquaintances. Frustrated, and with a bullet in her arm, Revy gives up on her mission, and despite the Lagoon Traders being hired by the NSA to safely get the American soldiers out of Roanapur and to their original destination in the "Golden Triangle," she's out of the action thanks to her injury. Her last attempt to "mentor" Fabiola regarding how to handle the delicate situation fails, as well, with the younger girl dissecting Revy's reasons for suggesting that she not believe in Garcia's ability to talk Roberta down without killing her. The arc closes with Revy writing off Fabiola's rage at Rock for the way he "gambled" with their lives, saying that "these guys [the Venezuelans] gotta have a reason before they can kill someone."
Personality: There's no two ways around it -- Revy is a deeply unpleasant and disturbed individual. The least of her vices include heavy drinking, chain smoking, and extreme greed and miserliness, the latter of which is the whole reason that Rock even got on the Black Lagoon in the first place: Revy wanted the extra money because she thought Balalaika was screwing the company over with how little she was paying them for such a dangerous job. While searching a sunken submarine for a painting, Revy eagerly loots the corpses for things to potentially sell off elsewhere, brushing off Rock's objections, and during "Greenback Jane" she shows absolutely no interest in keeping Jane from being killed until Eda arranges for a million-dollar payout from Jane and says that she'll split half of it with Revy on the spot. As another symptom of her general disrespect for other people, Revy likes referring to or addressing people by nicknames, many of which are derogatory, such as "Chinglish Gal" for the Taiwanese assassin Shenhua, who speaks "broken" English; "Fucking Four-Eyes" for the bespectacled killer maid Roberta; and "Lolita," "Chiquita," or "Shorty" for the still-killer-but-not-quite-as-killer maid Fabiola. She gets outright racist at times with her nicknaming as well, calling the Irish driver Leigharch a "fuckin' mick" and addressing a dying South American soldier as "beaner" when interrogating him. (Though it should be noted that it was Dutch who gave Rock his name, not Revy. As well, Revy has once referred to herself as a "chink bitch.")
In addition, she's extremely foul-mouthed and hot-tempered, with a side order of having very little sympathy for kids. In the "Rasta Blasta" arc, when Garcia threw the ice cream she was giving him right back in her face, she had no compunctions about drawing her gun on him and threatening to find out "what [he] had for breakfast." Rock pulls her back, but Revy just rants about Garcia's behavior: "Fuck, that kid is driving me nuts! I try to be nice, and then he gets all full of himself!! Fucking rugrat! Jesus, how was that kid raised?!" The irony, of course, is that despite being a hardened criminal, Revy is also not exactly the most mature individual around. Dutch calls her out on this when she grudgingly gets Garcia a Coke later in the arc with the stipulation that if he "whines again, [he's] dead meat!" In "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise," Rock once again has to stop Revy from throwing a tantrum when a street vendor refuses to give her a prize she believes she rightfully won (and arguably she was actually in the right this time), and although Revy backs down, she can be seen tapping her foot in frustration at being denied an outlet for her anger as Rock tries to smooth things over. Hell, the audience gets a great view of her temper right in the first arc. Upon being told by Benny and Dutch that her kidnapping of Rock was a bad idea, Revy pulls out one of her guns and begins shooting wildly in Rock's direction, saying that maybe she'll just "blow his sorry ass away and throw him overboard" if the rest of the Lagoon Company doesn't want him around. The scene also reveals Revy's tendency towards short-sightedness (collecting a ransom for him from his company is going to be difficult if he's dead) and her intense hatred of being proved wrong or lectured (which comes into play in a more serious light a couple of arcs from this point). Revy also has a stubborn streak of competitiveness and vengefulness, goading Rock into a drinking contest with her in the first story arc and then continuing to fight, fist-to-fist, with Roberta even after the entire kidnapping incident with Garcia has been resolved thanks to Hotel Moscow's involvement, all because Roberta put a bullet in her arm and knocked her out.
Given incidents like those mentioned above, it's almost as if Revy enjoys being angry and violent. And, well, to a point, that's more-or-less accurate. She certainly takes an unholy glee at the prospect of violence, at any rate: Revy has stated that she loves the "stench of blood and gunsmoke," and she greets practically any fight with a feral grin on her face. In "Ring-Ding Ship Chase," the oncoming confrontation with a fleet of small pirate boats is such a party to her that she actually puts on headphones and blasts rock music while jumping from boat to boat, skillfully gunning down all occupants. In "Goat, Jihad, Rock 'N Roll," while being chased by enraged terrorists, Revy gets into a "friendly" competition with Shenhua over how many of the terrorists they could kill, even deciding who would go first with rock-paper-scissors. She even gets pissed when Shenhua takes out most of the terrorists, leaving only leftovers for Revy. And seeing Ginji the Manslayer's sword skill for herself, far from frightening her, actually made Revy want to fight Ginji on the spot because she was so excited to have such a worthy opponent. Not to mention that she's been responsible for the destruction of the Yellow Flag at least three times, likely more.
Revy's known for gloating during her fights as well. Before wiping out the rest of Chaka's goons, she gives this speech:
Really, though, with gun-wielding skills like hers, Revy's got a lot of room to gloat. She's been packing heat since she was a teenager, and her two-handed gunwielding prowess is widely acknowledged by practically everyone in Roanapur, earning her the nickname Two Hand. The only one who's better than her at it is the man who (may have) taught her the style: the Triad leader Mr. Chang, who is one of a handful of people that Revy respects and even looks up to (she says at one point that she's "not at his level yet" when it comes to dual-wielding gunslinging).
Despite being a regular adrenaline junkie, though, Revy still maintains some sense of self-preservation. In both "Bloodsport Fairy Tale" and "El Baile de la Muerte," Revy quickly backs off from whatever fight she happens to be involved with because of the presence of the fearsome Hotel Moscow, who are known for their ruthless military precision when carrying out missions from their captain, Balalaika. There's no way she can mess with them and get out of the situation alive. On the other hand, Revy can get bored if the job is too easy, as seen when she has to pick off some seemingly motionless boats that have surrounded the Black Lagoon: "This blows, Dutch. It's like duck hunting. They got no fight in 'em."
It's a little less accurate to say that Revy "enjoys" being angry, however. Rather, it's simply that anger is the preferable emotion to her over sadness and grief stemming from her awful childhood -- and there is grief there, even if Revy would be hard-pressed to admit it. In "Die Ruckkher des Adlers," while inside the sunken sunken submarine they're both exploring, Revy explains to Rock her way of the world:
Rock, being kind-hearted and still fresh on the boat from a civilian life, tries to apologize for bringing up the touchy subject of her past, but Revy cuts off his apology, saying that she doesn't want his pity. The more important thing is that he not moralize to her, because that's when "you're no longer on my side. And that's when I take out my gun...and kill you."
Though her speech here makes her sound hardened and self-assured, it soon becomes apparent that Revy's not as emotionally bulletproof as she would have others believe. Barely hours after that talk, she's seen apathetically shooting up innocent crewmembers on board the ASU's ship in a fit of what Dutch refers to as "Whitman fever," when she shoots anyone that's within her range, whether or not they be innocent. Dutch mentions that this isn't the first time that Revy's gotten like this: it happened when Benny joined their crew, as well. Like Rock, Benny came from a civilian background, working at a university in Florida before (presumably) his hacking skills got him in trouble with both the mafia and the FBI and Revy and Dutch had to save him. And it's that civilian background that bothers Revy:
"Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise" suggests that having such living, breathing reminders of a more normal life so close by pains Revy because it makes her wish for something that she can never have. When she talks to Rock about how his family must be "a damn good ordinary family" because they "brought him up all legit," it's followed by the most vulnerable expression readers have ever seen from Revy up to and since that point. At the end of the arc, however, it seems that she's accepted that she's always going to live "in the darkness," simply because her life experiences don't make her cut out to live anywhere else even if she wanted to.
As if to pass on this epiphany to the next generation, Revy tries to persuade the young Fabiola towards a more cynical way of problem-solving during "El Baile de la Muerte." Since Fabiola, like herself, is from the slums (in this case, a barrio in Venezuela), Revy believes that it's only a matter of time before Fabiola breaks like she did a long time ago. However, Fabiola is far from receptive to Revy's views. In fact, she even eloquently chews Revy out for her hypocrisy and self-centeredness:
Fabiola's very existence also invalidates Revy's belief that, having come from the slums, the only way she can live is in a similarly shitty situation.
Revy, strangely, seems less than impressed with Fabiola's cutting and accurate speech, only saying that she now has no reason to save Fabiola or Garcia. When Fabiola remarks that Revy's laugh "is like the skeletons on El Dia de los Muertos," Revy only smiles wider.
Maybe Revy is simply more assured of her own rightness after having faced the divide in Japan...or maybe she's simply heard the same spiel before, from someone she has more respect for.
No discussion of Revy's deep-seated issues would be complete without including the point where she gets the closest to a total emotional breakdown. Occurring right after the "Die Ruckkher des Adlers" arc, and thus after Revy's nihilistic lecture to Rock and her subsequent bout of "Whitman fever," the scene clearly delineates Revy's absolute lack of ability to handle any confrontation that doesn't involve her shooting or at least raining some sort of violence down upon the other party. When Rock, who is supposed to be a squishy salaryman who belongs on "the other side," successfully stands up to a gunshot from Revy, disarms her, and then grabs her by her shirt to match her word-for-word in a heated screaming match, Revy is clearly caught off guard. She's thrown further off-kilter when Rock takes a punch from her directly in the face and still continues to defend his opinions to her, explaining he's only upset because he thought she was better than "the scum [he] left behind [in Japan]." It's a double-whammy for Revy, since not only has someone she thought was weak successfully stood up to her (and without weapons, even), but said person only stood up to her because he was essentially concerned for her, and that he looked up to her, even.
In subsequent chapters, it becomes clear that Revy's attitude towards both Rock and the world in general has changed a little (key words being "a little") as a result of that confrontation. She's no longer needlessly violent or angry with Rock, reserving her ire for warranted moments, such as when Rock continues to try Balalaika's patience by asking her to spare the Washimine Group. Though she claims she's "furious" with him for going as far as he did with a warmongering crime queen, Revy actually cools down not very long after, and she agrees to accompany him to see Yukio. Even other characters have noticed her affinity for the former salaryman, with Eda asking her if she "got it on" with Rock while the two were in Japan and Bao wondering if Rock and Revy had a fight since Revy wasn't accompanying him when Rock came to ask Bao about Roberta in "El Baile de la Muerte." Whether her feelings for Rock are romantic or not, he's the person in the story who means the most to her at the moment. Even when he turned his back on his civilian life in "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise," essentially accepting the perils of being an outlaw, Revy tried to protect him from seeing Yukio's suicide, fearing it would scar someone like him.
Revy's attitude adjustment towards everything else besides Rock is a lot harder to see, thanks to the series focusing on her pugilistic penchant, but arguably it's still there. During Fabiola's introduction, when the young maid is cornered at the Yellow Flag by some cartel members, Revy takes a surprisingly Rock-like route to helping her by dropping a booze bottle on the floor to distract the cartel members enough so that Fabiola can gain an advantage. And instead of joining in the firefight herself, she dives behind the reinforced bar to wait and see what would happen (despite her claiming that if Fabiola dies right then and there, she and Rock aren't going to find out what she, and by extension Garcia, are doing in Roanapur). Afterwards, Revy talks down the last remaining cartel member from finishing off Fabiola, saying that if he does, Roanapur is going to know him as "the guy who shot a kid in the back" and "start treating [him] like a bitch." Granted, she's got one of her cutlasses against his skull while saying this, but it's still a pretty eloquent negotiation for someone who's used to having her guns (or the threat of her guns) do the talking. On a relatively gentler note, Revy scolds Garcia for being so wrapped up in his own problems and fears that he can't bother to ask after Fabiola, who wanted to go swimming but was too concerned about him to ask. The effect is ruined a little when Fabiola tweaks Revy's nose as punishment for "speak[ing] to the young master like that," but the fact that Revy even spoke up at all demonstrates an interest in the finer points of non-violent, non-criminal human interaction that's been mostly absent from Revy's appearances thus far. Arguably, Revy's decision to guide Fabiola in this arc (such as telling her that it was okay to "kill 'em all so there wouldn't be trouble later") may also be the result of Rock's altruistic influence, causing her to want to pass down the lessons she wishes someone had taught her when she was younger: lessons about looking out for oneself and to hell with everyone else, lessons about believing in guns over goodness. On the other hand, Revy specifically tells Fabiola at one point that she doesn't believe in Rock's faith in Garcia to resolve the situation with Roberta, so if worse comes to worst, Fabiola needs to be the "ace in the hole" by putting "a dark round hole made by a 9mm round" into Roberta's head. So it may simply be Revy hedging her bets to make sure that the situation is resolved somehow, even if it's not to the satisfaction of Rock or anyone else with idealistic notions about how the world works.
For Revy, guns ultimately continue to speak louder than words.
Strengths
Physical: Revy's most obvious physical skill is her ability to dual-wield guns with fearsome accuracy and her equally amazing ability to somehow dodge bullets in the midst of a firefight, to the point that it's a huge deal when she actually does take a hit (the two most notable moments being Roberta shooting her in the arm, causing her to go up against the maid in a one-on-one fight for revenge, and one of Hotel Moscow's snipers getting the drop on her in "El Baile de la Muerte," at which point Revy drops out of the chase for Roberts because she doesn't want to go up against the organization). While Revy is rarely seen without her cutlasses, she's shown to be willing and able to do things unarmed if that's what it takes to get her point across, such as when she nailed Chaka with a flying kick to his face because she saw no point in drawing her gun for "a third-rate sack of shit like [him]." She seems to be physically fit in general, being able to leap from boat to boat with a grenade launcher in hand while barely breaking a sweat. Though her "gun fu" requires her to be acrobatic, she's seen displaying this ability outside of combat as well: when Dutch takes the Black Lagoon for a bit of a bullride in order to knock off some "uninvited guests," Revy has absolutely no problem with going with the flow while hanging onto a rope. Most importantly (I'm being sarcastic here), Revy has a high alcohol tolerance ("Beer's like piss water. Gives me no buzz at all").
Mental: Revy is obviously not a strategist like Dutch, nor a master at social psychology like Rock, but she's smart enough to keep herself alive. She was able to successfully lead Shenhua and Leigharch on an emergency mission to rescue Rock, even utilizing a certain amount of guile in neglecting to tell the two that the reason for the mission (the secret documents that Rock supposedly had) were with her all along. Being a gunslinger, Revy also has wide-ranging knowledge about firearms and most artillery in general. Although she obviously prefers her custom cutlasses, she's been seen wielding an RPG, a grenade launcher, and anti-tank rifles, among other models. A more light-hearted application of her knowledge is shown when Eda asks her what kind of gun the shepherd from the 23rd Psalm was carrying. Revy's response is a Jericho Model 941 FBL, because "Guy was Jewish, right? He would have had something from Israel."
Additionally, Revy's demonstrated some sort of "sixth sense" when it comes to recognizing either someone who is genuinely formidable (it's how she formed a strange kinship with Ginji despite neither of them speaking the other's language) or when something seems "off" about a certain situation. In the latter case, Revy usually announces that she can smell blood and/or gunsmoke in the air right before things go to hell (for instance, when Eda asks her if she can see the bounty hunters that are on their tail because they have Jane with them, Revy says that she "can smell 'em. A buncha low-life motherfuckers out for a midnight stroll"), but it can happen after the fact, as well (like when Revy and Rock arrived at the Washimine residence and Revy mentioned that the place smelled "real familiar" to her). Granted, given how the Black Lagoon series draws heavy inspiration from both American action movies and Hong Kong kung fu flicks, this particular trait of Revy's may simply be something added for dramatic flair. However, since Revy's essentially lived in an urban battleground for most of her life, it also seems reasonable to assume that her experiences have taught her to recognize signs of trouble in general.
Emotional: Revy is an extremely confident, self-assured young woman most of the time. Though she's humble enough when faced with true skill (her deference to Mr. Chang has already been mentioned, but she also admits that if Ginji hadn't been distracted by thoughts of Yukio during their match, she might have been the one six feet under instead), Revy is also extremely proud of her gunslinging talents ("Give me a gun, I'm second to none"). In light of all the crap she's been through in her life, she doesn't scare easily, either. As far as she's concerned, she (and the rest of Roanapur) are already dead anyway, so what's the point in worrying too much about her demise? Rock once accuses her of "rushing to [her] death," but Revy swiftly corrects him:
Essentially, Revy's very good at turning off her thinking cap and simply letting her instincts and the thrill of danger carry her through her tumultuous life. If you need someone to send into the middle of a fray to "kill 'em all," Revy's your girl.
Weaknesses
Physical: blown-out eardrums from close-quarters gun combat without any ear protection and arthritic hands from constant gun recoil While Revy possesses a godlike (or demonic) ability to dodge bullets, when she actually does get hit, she's shown to be as human as anyone else. A bullet to the shoulder thanks to one of Hotel Moscow's snipers in "El Baile de la Muerte" puts her out of action for at least two weeks and has her complaining about the pain and chomping on multiple Excedrins for it. Revy also gets pissed when Shenhua nails her with some throwing knives during "Greenback Jane," claiming that the attacks opened some wounds that had just healed on her.
Mental: Revy has no patience for most minutiae. Actually, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Revy has no patience with much of anything, including but not limited to diplomacy, tact, or introspection. Her first reaction when she realized that Sister Yolanda of the Rip-Off Church was trying to pull a fast one on the Lagoon Company's weapon orders was to whip out her guns and threaten the nun with violence. When Rock starts talking about the tea that's been served as the beginnings of his negotiation with Sister Yolanda, Revy just tells him to keep his mouth shut. Her lack of tact has been demonstrated on multiple occasions already (exhibit A: her interactions with Garcia Lovelace); her disinclination towards introspection shows up when she blows off Rock for trying to start a discussion about what it must feel like to die:
And the thing that'll get you ahead, in Revy's mind, is shooting your way through obstacles. Tell her what she needs to know so she can do that, and she's reasonably satisfied.
Emotional: Revy has a hair-trigger temper, but it's based off a deeper complex at the idea of being wrong about the choices she's made and the things she believes in. In order to survive her shitty life, Revy's needed unwavering confidence in herself so she can barrel through anyone who tries to trample on her. As a result, she's adopted a simplistic "me vs. the world" mentality, which leaves no room for doubt. To her, doubt is weakness, and she refuses to be weak. And if you don't agree, well, fuck you, because as she says to Rock during their infamous argument, "this is the only way [she knows] how to live [her] life."
But while her general self-confidence is a strength, her stubborn unwillingness to see the world in different shades of grey is definitely a weakness, in that it prevents her from fully coming to terms with her past experiences. Her bouts of "Whitman fever," where her eyes go scarily blank, suggests that she uses her life of violence as a means to block out unpleasant memories from her past. Though Revy seems to have gained a little insight into her own psyche during her trip to Japan, it's doubtful that it could have explained away all of her issues with being an unloved street child. Arguably, while Revy can deal with being unloved, what she can't deal with is being completely powerless to get her way in a situation, either with or without her guns. Sometimes she just reacts with a "little" temper tantrum; other times she's reduced to spouting empty declarations of cynicism because there's nothing else she can say. Either way, her softening attitude towards Rock shows that in spite of her monstrous acts and volatile personality, there is still a shred of humanity left within her. It's just a manner of navigating a massive minefield to cultivate it.
Anything else?: Revy will be receiving her Beretta "cutlasses" in Luceti, though not immediately. Wouldn't do to have her attempting to shoot all her potential CR, after all!
SAMPLES
First Person: On the Test Flight Meme here and here!
Third Person: There were many things unfamiliar about this mission that she had been chosen for: the battleground, the opponents, the people she worked with. But the one thing that Revy recognized was the smell of blood and death, and she gravitated towards it like a homesick college student towards unhealthy comfort food.
No matter you went, Revy thought as she gunned down the last of the Third Party foot soldiers in the area, death was always the same. Anything that lived and breathed could give up the ghost in a holy baptism of bullets, whether they wore expensive Italian suits or armor that could have come right out of the Stone Age. It didn't bother her that people here were resurrected again after a week; in fact it almost gave her a perverse pleasure to think that she'd always have someone to pump lead into. And there were certainly some people she could think of back home that she'd like to pump chock full of the stuff. But they weren't here, and might never even come to this shithole, so these sorry chickens would have to do for the moment.
It had taken very little time for Revy to adjust to the fact that her opponents had the ability to go airborne. Hell, it almost made it easier for her to shoot them down, giving that she'd honed her dual-wielding skills on clay pigeons. Dealing with their little magic tricks was more of a hassle, but not excessively so, considering that Revy sometimes deliberately punched holes through their giant wings before finishing them off, just because she could. Cruel? Maybe, but who fucking cared if they were gonna end dying soon enough anyway? It wasn't such a big deal.
"Yo, Hotshot," Revy said over the communicator she'd been given, "none of these guys have the artifact things you were lookin' for."
"That's fine," came the answer from the other end. "I expected as much. Just move on and keep an eye out."
With a soft, eager chuckle, Revy put away the communicator, took her guns back up, and stalked deeper into the ruins for more prey.
Name: Sora.
Journal Username:
cinnamonicalE-mail: alchymic.aria @ gmail
AIM/PLURK:
Current Characters at Luceti: N/A.
CHARACTER
Name: Revy. (real name: Rebecca; nickname: Two Hand)
Canon: Black Lagoon.
Gender: Female.
Age: Unspecified; probably early 20s.
Wing Color: Blood red.
Canon Point: After the end of the El Baile de la Muerte arc (chapter 76, vol. 9).
Canon Point Explanation: It's the last completed arc of the series thus far. The mangaka has started another one, but his updates since then have been very, very spotty. While the most recent chapters of the manga do contain some interesting moments for Revy (we see just how scarily "protective" she can be of Rock), at their core they're just elaboration and confirmation of things we've seen from her already.
History: Although much of Revy's history prior to the series remains shrouded in shadow, she's arguably the member of the Lagoon Company about whom we have the most background (surpassing even Rock, the "main" protagonist -- although not by much, really). Originally from Manhattan's Chinatown, Revy entered the criminal world at a very young age. The timeline isn't clear, but it's known that she dropped out of school in the middle of junior high; that she once had an encounter with a group of corrupt cops who ganged up on her for a crime she didn't commit just because she was "a little chink bitch with no power," and her very first murder may have been out of self-defense or revenge against one of them; that she was armed on the streets with both cigarettes and a gun, practicing her aim against empty aluminum cans when she wasn't stealing, killing, or doing other "vile crap"; and that she was arrested and jailed at some point, but escaped (leaving behind outstanding warrants in the NYPD's 27th precinct) and made her way to Roanapur, where Dutch hired her on as part of the Lagoon Traders and where she may have picked up (or refined) the "two-handed" gunslinging style she's now noted for. It's also when she acquired her trademark weapons, the custom Beretta 92Fs that she calls the "Praiyachat Sword Cutlass Specials," or simply just her "cutlasses."
Revy debuts right at the beginning of the series, from Rock's point-of-view as he's staring at both Revy and Dutch from the business ends of their guns. It's nothing personal, of course. It's just that Rock has something that the Lagoon Traders had been sent to "pick up" -- a disk from his company, Asahi Heavy Industries -- and they needed to double-check that he didn't have anything else on him. Dutch is satisfied that Rock has nothing more to offer them, and so lets him and the crew of the ship he was on go. Revy has other plans: she takes Rock hostage with the intent of extorting ransom money from his company as a supplement to the money they're already getting for the job. Unfortunately, Asahi doesn't deem him worth saving and asks him to "perish in the South China Sea for us." Not long after, the Lagoon Traders are ambushed by a helicopter manned by mercenaries hired by Asahi to ensure exactly that fate. Rock turns the tables on them when he directs Dutch to launch their boat into the air to get close enough to fire off one of the torpedos still attached to the deck, thereby destroying the helicopter. With that out of the way, the Lagoon Traders return to shore and hand the disk over to their client, the Russian mob queen Balalaika. Rock's boss also happens to be on the scene, given that he's in negotiations with Balalaika over the fate of the disk. He offers Rock his job back, but Rock turns it down on the basis that they've already declared him dead. Revy invites him to join the Lagoon Traders instead.
The company's next job has them sailing out to pick up some embezzled goods, but (pardon the potential meme) it's a trap, set up by a disgruntled former client who didn't like that Lagoon Traders was willing to do jobs for Balalaika. Aside from the unpleasant surprise of being suddenly attacked on what was thought to be a routine job, things end cleanly enough with Revy easily taking out every single boat in the enemy fleet by herself and the mastermind behind the scheme getting himself blown up by Balalaika. Mainly, this arc is notable for being the first time readers hear anything significant about Revy's dark past. She tells Rock that she's been killing and stealing and "[doing] all sorts of vile crap" since she was a kid, but that "[her] story ain't worth shit" anyway.
Things get considerably more heated when the Lagoon Traders are hired to "transport" 12-year-old Garcia Lovelace, an aristocratic heir from Venezuela who was kidnapped by Manisalera cartel members as part of a ploy to "convince" Garcia's father to sell them his estate. Garcia himself isn't the problem -- it's the Lovelace family maid that is. Roberta, a former FARC guerilla soldier and trained assassin, is intensely devoted to the well-being of the Lovelaces out of gratitude for taking her in, and so when she shows up in Roanapur to get Garcia back, chaos ensues. The Yellow Flag (a local dive bar) as well as the Lagoon Traders' car get shot up, and Revy engages Roberta in a one-on-one fight out of revenge for getting shot by her earlier. Balalaika eventually arrives to announce that Hotel Moscow (the Russian mafia that she leads in Roanapur) has crushed the Manisalera cartel both locally and back in Venezuela, thereby rendering the fact of Garcia's kidnapping rather moot in the entire scheme of things. This does nothing to quell the hostility between Revy and Roberta, leading Dutch to suggest that the two women simply duke it out with their fists until they feel they've settled things. And it gets settled, all right...with Revy knocked out cold.
The series dives deeper into Revy's past -- and her character -- when she and Rock head into the ocean in order to retrieve a forgotten painting for their client from the bottom of a wrecked German submarine from WW2. Revy brushes off Rock's question about what the people who died in the sub were thinking before they died, accusing him of "get[ting] off on being gloomy" and saying that "thinking about shit like that won't do you any good." Later, when Rock tries to dissuade Revy from taking some Iron Crosses and other memorabilia to pawn off for cash, she lectures him on his sentimentality, revealing that the two things in the world she puts the most value on are money and guns. She also says that if Rock ever tries to moralize to her again, she'll kill him.
Revy and Rock return to the boat empty-handed thanks to members of the Aryan Socialist Union snatching the painting from them at the last moment. Dutch takes Revy with him that night to retrieve the painting, but gets momentarily sidetracked when he has to stop an upset, unsettled Revy from shooting up uninvolved civilians. They eventually make their way to Rachmann, leader of the Aryan Socialist Union, where they find out via phone that the client who initially hired them for this job also happens to be a Nazi -- one from Germany's old guard. Sir Alfred sent both the Lagoon Traders and the ASU to retrieve the painting, serving both as insurance for retrieving it as well as a test of the ASU's worthiness to receive patronage from the client. Needless to say, the ASU failed spectacularly. After Revy toys with Rachmann a little, she and Dutch shoot him dead.
As the two of them wait for Benny and Rock to come pick them up, Dutch once again scolds Revy for losing her cool earlier, saying that it's fine if she doesn't want to talk about whatever was bothering her, but she has to remember that her actions will affect him and his business as the boss of the Lagoon Traders. Revy opens up a little, saying that it's not that she doesn't like Rock, but it bothers her that Rock is so obviously not from "their" world of lawlessness, and because of that, she "can't work with him."
The incidental antagonism between Rock and Revy comes to a head after a day of odd jobs, the last of which involved Revy receiving a mild lecture from a client for being too trigger-happy. Rock brings up said lecture as a rebuttal in conversation while he and Revy are hanging out at an outdoor restaurant. He also asks if Revy's constant bad mood throughout their job runs is due to their conversation inside the submarine. Revy tells him to shut up, but instead of backing down, Rock says (twice, even) that he's not going to apologize to her for anything he's said or done so far. Furious, Revy draws her gun and pulls the trigger right at point-blank range, but miraculously Rock escapes a head wound by shoving the gun aside and then yanking it from Revy's grip. He then proceeds to verbally shred her for being a "shallow tightwad and a dick" that he has to kiss up to as well as being a self-centered hypocrite who refuses to get to know others yet complains when others don't understand her. But the real reason Rock is hung up on her attitude is because it reminds him of the "scum" and the rat race he left behind in Japan, and he doesn't want to hear that from the girl who taught him that there was a better way to live than as a cog in a corporate machine. Stumped for a moment, Revy falls back on flinging insults at Rock, though much more half-heartedly than before. (For a certain definition of "half-heartedly," anyway.) Their fight is interrupted by corrupt local policeman Chief Watsap, who takes both Rock and Revy into custody to do regulation paperwork in order to smooth the incident over. In the police car, Revy asks Rock what side he's on, to which Rock responds that he's on "his own ground...and nowhere else." After a moment, Revy asks for a light for her cigarette, and Rock shares his already-lit cigarette with her.
Revy's role in the manhunt for the homicidal Romanian twins Hansel and Gretel is fairly minimal. She joins Eda in chasing them down, getting closer to the twins than any of the other bounty hunters, but end up ultimately losing out due to Hotel Moscow being dead-set on avenging their fallen brethren by killing both of the twins. Balalaika and her snipers only manage to kill Hansel at first; Gretel escapes long enough to get the Lagoon Traders to transport her to safety. While in transit, Gretel, having had her first taste of true kindness and compassion from Rock, attempts to "thank" him by dropping her pants and flashing Rock, causing Rock to flee the room in bewilderment and frustration. Revy storms into the room and punches Gretel as retaliation, threatening to kill the girl herself if Gretel ever "mess[es] with Rock again." The rest of the trip continues with no such incident, setting up for a reasonably "happy" ending that is soon shattered by Hotel Moscow's hired gun, who kills Gretel just as she steps off the boat to leave.
She takes more of the spotlight in the "Goat, Jihad, Rock 'n Roll" arc, heading an impromptu operation to rescue Rock from terrorists who have taken him hostage due to believing that he held documents regarding an upcoming attack masterminded by Hezbollah. In truth, Revy had the documents herself all along, but told Shenhua and Leigharch (their hired help for the job, courtesy of the Triad leader Mr. Chang) otherwise in order to get them to go along with rescuing Rock before delivering the documents to Chang's CIA contact, who strangely enough appears to know Revy from her Manhattan days. Lest anyone think she's getting soft, Revy bashes Rock in the head after he thanks her for her help, insisting that she's never going risk herself for him ever again. This is a complete lie, considering that she follows Rock to Japan as his bodyguard when he gets hired by Balalaika to be her interpreter during her meetings with the Washimine Group, a yakuza family who wants Hotel Moscow's help in fighting back against their former allies, the Kousa Kai.
Not all the drama with her in Tokyo involves gunfights, however. While at a New Years' street fair, Revy suggests to Rock that he visit his family while he still can. It's not just referring to physical proximity: once he reaches a certain point of saturation in the criminal lifestyle (e.g., being arrested), he won't be able to show his face to them anymore. Rock says that he's not really on good terms with his family, but Revy brushes it off, saying that at least they raised him legit. There's a rare wistful expression from her as she says this, but it quickly evaporates when she attempts to shoot down her last target at a game booth and fails because it's loaded with a weight. At this point, the two of them meet another street vendor (and its unofficial peacekeeper), Ginji Matsuzaki, and Yukio Washimine, a schoolgirl whose father used to own the booth that Ginji now keeps (and who, unknown to Rock and Revy at the time, was the previous boss of the Washimine Group). As Yukio and Rock talk, Revy has her own "conversation" with Ginji. The two can't understand each other thanks to the language barrier, but nevertheless both of them recognize in the other a kindred soul -- someone "reek[ing] of the stench of blood and guts." Readers find out in another scene that Ginji used to be a feared assassin working for the Washimine Group known as "Manslayer Ginji."
Later in their stay, Revy is seen sitting on a park bench waiting for Rock to come back from visiting his family. She passes the time watching some kids play at a nearby playground, but their mock gunfights only make her remember her younger days in Manhattan, shooting at cans near Mott and Canal. She's snapped out of her reverie when a stray shot from one of the popguns nicks her in the shoulder. Initially enraged, she ends up gleefully showing off her sharpshooting skills to the kids with one of their popguns. Soon she's even horsing around with them in their little Western role-play. It takes a serious turn when Revy shows them the "proper" way to die from a gunshot, but once she realizes Rock has been watching her with the kids for a while already, she gets up, drags him off, and makes him promise to never tell anyone about what he just saw.
Revy accompanies Rock to a meeting with Hotel Moscow and the Washimine Group. Though she remains in the background of the meeting like a good bodyguard should, she nevertheless catches the eye of Chaka, one of Washimine's enforcers. After the meeting, as she's waiting for Balalaika to finish socializing, Chaka hits on Revy, boasting about having killed ten men. Unsurprisingly, Revy is not impressed, and tell him (quite literally) that he smells. It's then that Rock returns to fetch her, since Balalaika and the rest of Hotel Moscow are leaving. Chaka doesn't take kindly to Rock's interruption; he proceeds to beat him bloody right in front of Revy, all for the purpose of trying to get Revy to draw her gun. Thankfully, the rest of the Washimine members appear in the hallway just then and step in to stop Chaka. Nevertheless, Revy tells Rock that she's going to need him to get her "cutlasses" from Roanapur, as a defensive measure against Chaka wanting to get into a fight with her.
Things get ugly between Hotel Moscow and the Washimine Group in a different way, as well. The acting boss of Washimine, Tsugio Bando, is so incensed by Balalaika's ruthless methods of intimidation that one night he attempts to kill her himself. But Balalaika effortlessly overpowers him, snapping his neck. Because of a certain agreement with the Kousa Council, this forces Yukio -- as the only direct descendent of the Washimine line -- to become the new true boss of the group. As the Washimine Group prepares to defend itself against Hotel Moscow and its reinforcements, Rock begs Revy to come with him to see Yukio so they can talk. At first, Revy scoffs at this, reminding Rock that the both of them are technically Yukio's enemies now, and that he should stay out of the mess for his own good. However, she softens almost right afterwards, saying that as his bodyguard, her job is to protect his life, not tell him how to live it.
When they arrive at the Washimine residence, Revy instantly senses that something's off. She storms in with her guns drawn, but the place is empty except for the corpse of Yoshida (another high-ranking Washimine officer). Revy examines Yoshida's corpse, and concludes that, based on the nature of the exit wound as well as the lack of casings on the floor, Yoshida was likely shot by Chaka, who wields a large caliber revolver. The two of them are soon joined by an irate Ginji, who's under the impression that Rock and Revy were responsible for Yoshida's death and Yukio's abduction. Rock smooths things over with Ginji, explaining that he and Revy only came to get Yukio out of harm's way. The four of them track the perpetrators down to a local bowling alley.
At the bowling alley, Revy and Ginji crash Chaka's "party" together, gunning down his goons. Chaka escapes from the two with Yukio, but Rock (who came in from the back) knocks him out temporarily with a bowling pin and takes Yukio with him. After Revy finishes "cleaning up" her area of the bowling alley, she manages to find a now-recovered Chaka, witnessing him shooting his own men after they try to escape. Gleeful at meeting her again, Chaka tries to start a Western-style gun duel with her, but she greets him with a flying kick to his face instead, saying that while she'd love to kill him herself, she isn't interested if he's going to make it easy for her. Revy lures Chaka to the pool before standing back to let Ginji have it out with him. Ginji effortlessly defeats Chaka in four moves, the first of which involves slicing a bullet in half with his katana. Then he slices off the barrel of Chaka's gun and then Chaka's hand itself before simply shoving Chaka into the pool with the hilt of his sword. Revy spits on him as he drowns, and Ginji shoves Chaka under with his now sheathed blade. Afterwards, Revy tries to goad Ginji into a fight with her, wanting to test his skill now that she's seen him in action, but Ginji says that if she's lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be), they'll get a chance to duke it out one-on-one.
At the bowling alley, Revy and Ginji crash Chaka's "party" together, gunning down his goons. Chaka escapes from the two with Yukio, but Rock (who came in from the back) knocks him out temporarily with a bowling pin and takes Yukio with him. After Revy finishes "cleaning up" her area of the bowling alley, she manages to find a now-recovered Chaka, witnessing him shooting his own men after they try to escape. Gleeful at meeting her again, Chaka tries to start a Western-style gun duel with her, but she greets him with a flying kick to his face instead, saying that while she'd love to kill him herself, she isn't interested if he's going to make it easy for her. Revy lures Chaka to the pool before standing back to let Ginji have it out with him. Ginji effortlessly defeats Chaka in four moves, the first of which involves slicing a bullet in half with his katana. Then he slices off the barrel of Chaka's gun and then Chaka's hand itself before simply shoving Chaka into the pool with the hilt of his sword. Revy spits on him as he drowns, and Ginji shoves Chaka under with his now sheathed blade. Afterwards, Revy tries to goad Ginji into a fight with her, wanting to test his skill now that she's seen him in action, but Ginji says that if she's lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be), they'll get a chance to duke it out one-on-one. With Chaka and his men all dead, the four of them go their separate ways.
Revy's next test as Rock's bodyguard is to protect him from, of all people, his own boss for the moment: Balalaika herself. When Rock finds out that Balalaika is considering a new business partnership with the Kousa Council in addition to wiping out the Washimine Group, he tries to persuade her otherwise. Balalaika responds by grabbing Rock by the collar, shoving him up against a car, and pointing her gun at him. In a panic, Revy whips out her own weapons, aiming one at Balalaika and one at Balalaika's second-in-command, Boris. She demands that Balalaika put her gun down, but the other woman only says that even though she doesn't know what's going on, Revy shouldn't "wish for a life like [Rock's]." Just when it seems like he's talked himself into a corner, Rock manages to amuse Balalaika enough to get her to holster her gun. This doesn't placate Revy, who says that she can protect him through any sort of trials life might throw their way, but "there's no way of protecting somebody who just can't wait to die." And if were anyone else but Rock involved, she would have already "popped off a few rounds." Rock apologizes, and asks Revy to come back with him to his town.
As they're sitting together on a park bench, Revy reflects on Balalaika's words. She says that because Tokyo is such a nice place, it made her forget that she's not cut out to live anywhere else but "places where the air's always dirty." She wishes Rock a farewell, thinking that he's going to leave the criminal life behind, but Rock says that he didn't come back to stay: he came back to forget his old life for good. Just then, the kids that Revy met earlier come up to her and ask her to show off her sharpshooting again. Revy does so -- with her actual guns this time. With a slightly cynical grin, she tells the kids to go back home to their mothers.
After Balalaika "talks" with the Kousa Kai (read: kills 'em all), Revy roars up on a motorcycle to give Rock a ride to Hotel Moscow's boat before the entire town is completely sealed off thanks to Balalaika's actions. Rock, however, insists on meeting with Yukio and Ginji in order to tell them that Balalaika has officially pardoned the Washimine Group. When the two meet up again, Yukio says that she cannot trust the word of Balalaika, and that furthermore, honor demands that she take vengeance on Hotel Moscow for Bando's death. With negotiations at an impasse, Revy and Ginji step up to physically settle the matter. The two fighters become locked in a violent stalemate, which ends when Ginji becomes distracted by the memory of something Yukio said to him earlier. Revy takes advantage of the moment to shoot him point-blank in the forehead. As Rock comes by to dress Revy's wounds, Yukio picks up Ginji's fallen katana and holds it to her throat, stating her intent to clear the slate with her act of suicide. Revy begs Rock not to watch, warning that he's going to scar him, but Rock doesn't look away as Yukio slices her own throat and falls on top of Ginji's corpse. Not long after, Revy and Rock return to Roanapur.
The Lagoon Traders get caught up in protecting a counterfeiter named Janet "Jane" Bhai after she accidentally gets on the bad side of her most recent client, the Girolamo crime family from Florida, who have hired a "carnival of killers" to hunt her down. The arc ends with the Lagoon Traders' dock getting destroyed in the resulting firefight, but they have bigger problems to worry about when the killer maid Roberta returns to Roanapur, dead-set on revenge for the death of her master, Diego Lovelace. Consequently, Garcia Lovelace and another maid named Fabiola are also in Roanapur, to ask Rock for his help in finding Roberta. Revy and the rest of the Lagoon Traders want no part in the mess, particularly since Roberta's target is essentially the United States military. However, Eda convinces Revy that Rock is going to need someone to at least "let him know which way the wind's blowing," especially because if he messes this up, it's not just him that's going to be in trouble -- it's everyone in Roanapur who benefits from not having the US sights trained on them. At the very least, Revy needs to be his "street cred," since Rock is so wholesome-looking that no one in Roanapur is going to give him the information he needs in making sure things don't completely blow up.
When Rock tries to get Revy's help, she reveals that one of her issues with him at the moment is that he tends to jump headfirst into problematic situations without ever thinking how she is going to deal with it, like he did in Japan. Revy says that if she's going to follow him into things like that, she needs to know "how [she] can live with what [Rock] do[es]." Rock explains that if Revy is a "gun," as she once said back in Japan, then he's a bullet, and a bullet is useless unless it's being fired from a gun. Afterwards, Revy gives him an actual bullet before setting off to see some contacts, like the gunsmith Praiyachat and the explosives expert Toh Chi. In her reconnaissance, she finds out that Roberta's going to have "help" from other mercenaries, so she calls up Shenhua (and by association, Sawyer and Lotton from the "carnival of killers") to deal with them, along with soldiers hired by a Colombian cartel that also wants Roberta dead. In between the fighting, Revy takes the time to try to "mentor" Fabiola in her own way, telling Fabiola that if she wants to bring Roberta and Garcia back with her to Venezuela, she can't afford to take the moral high road in a place like Roanapur.
Eventually, Revy and her crew run into Roberta herself, but manage to escape more-or-less unharmed when Roberta sees Fabiola and momentarily lapses back into her kinder "maid" persona with her before walking past the group. Seeing that Fabiola was unable to make Roberta snap out of her vengeful mindset, they go searching for Garcia (who got separated earlier from the group), and find him with two American soldiers. They prepare to take the soldiers down, but they're intercepted by Balalaika and her soldiers, who are determined to get the Americans out of Roanapur alive and have no compunctions about destroying anything that prevents that outcome, including friendly acquaintances. Frustrated, and with a bullet in her arm, Revy gives up on her mission, and despite the Lagoon Traders being hired by the NSA to safely get the American soldiers out of Roanapur and to their original destination in the "Golden Triangle," she's out of the action thanks to her injury. Her last attempt to "mentor" Fabiola regarding how to handle the delicate situation fails, as well, with the younger girl dissecting Revy's reasons for suggesting that she not believe in Garcia's ability to talk Roberta down without killing her. The arc closes with Revy writing off Fabiola's rage at Rock for the way he "gambled" with their lives, saying that "these guys [the Venezuelans] gotta have a reason before they can kill someone."
Personality: There's no two ways around it -- Revy is a deeply unpleasant and disturbed individual. The least of her vices include heavy drinking, chain smoking, and extreme greed and miserliness, the latter of which is the whole reason that Rock even got on the Black Lagoon in the first place: Revy wanted the extra money because she thought Balalaika was screwing the company over with how little she was paying them for such a dangerous job. While searching a sunken submarine for a painting, Revy eagerly loots the corpses for things to potentially sell off elsewhere, brushing off Rock's objections, and during "Greenback Jane" she shows absolutely no interest in keeping Jane from being killed until Eda arranges for a million-dollar payout from Jane and says that she'll split half of it with Revy on the spot. As another symptom of her general disrespect for other people, Revy likes referring to or addressing people by nicknames, many of which are derogatory, such as "Chinglish Gal" for the Taiwanese assassin Shenhua, who speaks "broken" English; "Fucking Four-Eyes" for the bespectacled killer maid Roberta; and "Lolita," "Chiquita," or "Shorty" for the still-killer-but-not-quite-as-killer maid Fabiola. She gets outright racist at times with her nicknaming as well, calling the Irish driver Leigharch a "fuckin' mick" and addressing a dying South American soldier as "beaner" when interrogating him. (Though it should be noted that it was Dutch who gave Rock his name, not Revy. As well, Revy has once referred to herself as a "chink bitch.")
In addition, she's extremely foul-mouthed and hot-tempered, with a side order of having very little sympathy for kids. In the "Rasta Blasta" arc, when Garcia threw the ice cream she was giving him right back in her face, she had no compunctions about drawing her gun on him and threatening to find out "what [he] had for breakfast." Rock pulls her back, but Revy just rants about Garcia's behavior: "Fuck, that kid is driving me nuts! I try to be nice, and then he gets all full of himself!! Fucking rugrat! Jesus, how was that kid raised?!" The irony, of course, is that despite being a hardened criminal, Revy is also not exactly the most mature individual around. Dutch calls her out on this when she grudgingly gets Garcia a Coke later in the arc with the stipulation that if he "whines again, [he's] dead meat!" In "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise," Rock once again has to stop Revy from throwing a tantrum when a street vendor refuses to give her a prize she believes she rightfully won (and arguably she was actually in the right this time), and although Revy backs down, she can be seen tapping her foot in frustration at being denied an outlet for her anger as Rock tries to smooth things over. Hell, the audience gets a great view of her temper right in the first arc. Upon being told by Benny and Dutch that her kidnapping of Rock was a bad idea, Revy pulls out one of her guns and begins shooting wildly in Rock's direction, saying that maybe she'll just "blow his sorry ass away and throw him overboard" if the rest of the Lagoon Company doesn't want him around. The scene also reveals Revy's tendency towards short-sightedness (collecting a ransom for him from his company is going to be difficult if he's dead) and her intense hatred of being proved wrong or lectured (which comes into play in a more serious light a couple of arcs from this point). Revy also has a stubborn streak of competitiveness and vengefulness, goading Rock into a drinking contest with her in the first story arc and then continuing to fight, fist-to-fist, with Roberta even after the entire kidnapping incident with Garcia has been resolved thanks to Hotel Moscow's involvement, all because Roberta put a bullet in her arm and knocked her out.
Given incidents like those mentioned above, it's almost as if Revy enjoys being angry and violent. And, well, to a point, that's more-or-less accurate. She certainly takes an unholy glee at the prospect of violence, at any rate: Revy has stated that she loves the "stench of blood and gunsmoke," and she greets practically any fight with a feral grin on her face. In "Ring-Ding Ship Chase," the oncoming confrontation with a fleet of small pirate boats is such a party to her that she actually puts on headphones and blasts rock music while jumping from boat to boat, skillfully gunning down all occupants. In "Goat, Jihad, Rock 'N Roll," while being chased by enraged terrorists, Revy gets into a "friendly" competition with Shenhua over how many of the terrorists they could kill, even deciding who would go first with rock-paper-scissors. She even gets pissed when Shenhua takes out most of the terrorists, leaving only leftovers for Revy. And seeing Ginji the Manslayer's sword skill for herself, far from frightening her, actually made Revy want to fight Ginji on the spot because she was so excited to have such a worthy opponent. Not to mention that she's been responsible for the destruction of the Yellow Flag at least three times, likely more.
Revy's known for gloating during her fights as well. Before wiping out the rest of Chaka's goons, she gives this speech:
REVY: I pity you fucks. You guys are shit outta luck...no one's getting outta here alive. No one. Run as fast as you can, 'cause you've just checked into Motel Hell. And guess what...the Boogieman's doin' room service!
Really, though, with gun-wielding skills like hers, Revy's got a lot of room to gloat. She's been packing heat since she was a teenager, and her two-handed gunwielding prowess is widely acknowledged by practically everyone in Roanapur, earning her the nickname Two Hand. The only one who's better than her at it is the man who (may have) taught her the style: the Triad leader Mr. Chang, who is one of a handful of people that Revy respects and even looks up to (she says at one point that she's "not at his level yet" when it comes to dual-wielding gunslinging).
Despite being a regular adrenaline junkie, though, Revy still maintains some sense of self-preservation. In both "Bloodsport Fairy Tale" and "El Baile de la Muerte," Revy quickly backs off from whatever fight she happens to be involved with because of the presence of the fearsome Hotel Moscow, who are known for their ruthless military precision when carrying out missions from their captain, Balalaika. There's no way she can mess with them and get out of the situation alive. On the other hand, Revy can get bored if the job is too easy, as seen when she has to pick off some seemingly motionless boats that have surrounded the Black Lagoon: "This blows, Dutch. It's like duck hunting. They got no fight in 'em."
It's a little less accurate to say that Revy "enjoys" being angry, however. Rather, it's simply that anger is the preferable emotion to her over sadness and grief stemming from her awful childhood -- and there is grief there, even if Revy would be hard-pressed to admit it. In "Die Ruckkher des Adlers," while inside the sunken sunken submarine they're both exploring, Revy explains to Rock her way of the world:
REVY: Back when I was a snot-nosed kid crawling in the gutter...for some strange reason, God and love always seemed to be sold out and out of reach. Since I was too small to figure out how things worked, I wasted my time crying and asking God for help that'd never come. Of course, that stopped after the night some cops ganged up on me and I almost got killed for a crime I didn't commit. Their only reason was that I was living in the slums. What's a little chink bitch with no power and no God gonna turn to? Money and guns -- that's what. When you got both, it's smooth sailing.
Rock, being kind-hearted and still fresh on the boat from a civilian life, tries to apologize for bringing up the touchy subject of her past, but Revy cuts off his apology, saying that she doesn't want his pity. The more important thing is that he not moralize to her, because that's when "you're no longer on my side. And that's when I take out my gun...and kill you."
Though her speech here makes her sound hardened and self-assured, it soon becomes apparent that Revy's not as emotionally bulletproof as she would have others believe. Barely hours after that talk, she's seen apathetically shooting up innocent crewmembers on board the ASU's ship in a fit of what Dutch refers to as "Whitman fever," when she shoots anyone that's within her range, whether or not they be innocent. Dutch mentions that this isn't the first time that Revy's gotten like this: it happened when Benny joined their crew, as well. Like Rock, Benny came from a civilian background, working at a university in Florida before (presumably) his hacking skills got him in trouble with both the mafia and the FBI and Revy and Dutch had to save him. And it's that civilian background that bothers Revy:
REVY: Rock belongs on the other side. He's just too different from us. There's a wall between us. Like he's from another world...and I just can't stand how he gives that off sometimes.
"Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise" suggests that having such living, breathing reminders of a more normal life so close by pains Revy because it makes her wish for something that she can never have. When she talks to Rock about how his family must be "a damn good ordinary family" because they "brought him up all legit," it's followed by the most vulnerable expression readers have ever seen from Revy up to and since that point. At the end of the arc, however, it seems that she's accepted that she's always going to live "in the darkness," simply because her life experiences don't make her cut out to live anywhere else even if she wanted to.
As if to pass on this epiphany to the next generation, Revy tries to persuade the young Fabiola towards a more cynical way of problem-solving during "El Baile de la Muerte." Since Fabiola, like herself, is from the slums (in this case, a barrio in Venezuela), Revy believes that it's only a matter of time before Fabiola breaks like she did a long time ago. However, Fabiola is far from receptive to Revy's views. In fact, she even eloquently chews Revy out for her hypocrisy and self-centeredness:
REVY: You got a mouth on you, kid. Don't forget you come from the dumps. The world looking like a flower garden to you now? You can hail the young master as Jehovah all you want. But if you think he can squeeze out gold bricks, you're wrong.
FABIOLA: I'm not the one who thinks the world is a flower garden. Maybe...it's YOU. You think you're the only one who got kicked out of the garden? Is that why you're bitter about everything? What I wanted to say was, that's the difference between you and me. I don't think the world is a garden or a cesspool. This world is grey like a sewer rat. Everything's vague. It's grey, for better or worse. I know why you talk badly about the young master. You want me to tell you? You can't accept that people like him exist in this world. You can't accept that somebody is willing to risk their life for another for unselfish reasons. Why? Because then it'd all be a lie, this cesspool of a world you speak of.
Fabiola's very existence also invalidates Revy's belief that, having come from the slums, the only way she can live is in a similarly shitty situation.
Revy, strangely, seems less than impressed with Fabiola's cutting and accurate speech, only saying that she now has no reason to save Fabiola or Garcia. When Fabiola remarks that Revy's laugh "is like the skeletons on El Dia de los Muertos," Revy only smiles wider.
REVY: That's right. I'm surprised you noticed, little girl. I came all the way from the land of the dead. From the dark depths of the burial tomb, gun in hand. We all did. Me, your head matron, those soldiers, the people in this town, every last one of us. So, little girl. Offer up some marigolds and some cuervo. Then...to the poor little girl who's about to die far away in Asia...I'll offer her some chocolate.
Maybe Revy is simply more assured of her own rightness after having faced the divide in Japan...or maybe she's simply heard the same spiel before, from someone she has more respect for.
No discussion of Revy's deep-seated issues would be complete without including the point where she gets the closest to a total emotional breakdown. Occurring right after the "Die Ruckkher des Adlers" arc, and thus after Revy's nihilistic lecture to Rock and her subsequent bout of "Whitman fever," the scene clearly delineates Revy's absolute lack of ability to handle any confrontation that doesn't involve her shooting or at least raining some sort of violence down upon the other party. When Rock, who is supposed to be a squishy salaryman who belongs on "the other side," successfully stands up to a gunshot from Revy, disarms her, and then grabs her by her shirt to match her word-for-word in a heated screaming match, Revy is clearly caught off guard. She's thrown further off-kilter when Rock takes a punch from her directly in the face and still continues to defend his opinions to her, explaining he's only upset because he thought she was better than "the scum [he] left behind [in Japan]." It's a double-whammy for Revy, since not only has someone she thought was weak successfully stood up to her (and without weapons, even), but said person only stood up to her because he was essentially concerned for her, and that he looked up to her, even.
In subsequent chapters, it becomes clear that Revy's attitude towards both Rock and the world in general has changed a little (key words being "a little") as a result of that confrontation. She's no longer needlessly violent or angry with Rock, reserving her ire for warranted moments, such as when Rock continues to try Balalaika's patience by asking her to spare the Washimine Group. Though she claims she's "furious" with him for going as far as he did with a warmongering crime queen, Revy actually cools down not very long after, and she agrees to accompany him to see Yukio. Even other characters have noticed her affinity for the former salaryman, with Eda asking her if she "got it on" with Rock while the two were in Japan and Bao wondering if Rock and Revy had a fight since Revy wasn't accompanying him when Rock came to ask Bao about Roberta in "El Baile de la Muerte." Whether her feelings for Rock are romantic or not, he's the person in the story who means the most to her at the moment. Even when he turned his back on his civilian life in "Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise," essentially accepting the perils of being an outlaw, Revy tried to protect him from seeing Yukio's suicide, fearing it would scar someone like him.
Revy's attitude adjustment towards everything else besides Rock is a lot harder to see, thanks to the series focusing on her pugilistic penchant, but arguably it's still there. During Fabiola's introduction, when the young maid is cornered at the Yellow Flag by some cartel members, Revy takes a surprisingly Rock-like route to helping her by dropping a booze bottle on the floor to distract the cartel members enough so that Fabiola can gain an advantage. And instead of joining in the firefight herself, she dives behind the reinforced bar to wait and see what would happen (despite her claiming that if Fabiola dies right then and there, she and Rock aren't going to find out what she, and by extension Garcia, are doing in Roanapur). Afterwards, Revy talks down the last remaining cartel member from finishing off Fabiola, saying that if he does, Roanapur is going to know him as "the guy who shot a kid in the back" and "start treating [him] like a bitch." Granted, she's got one of her cutlasses against his skull while saying this, but it's still a pretty eloquent negotiation for someone who's used to having her guns (or the threat of her guns) do the talking. On a relatively gentler note, Revy scolds Garcia for being so wrapped up in his own problems and fears that he can't bother to ask after Fabiola, who wanted to go swimming but was too concerned about him to ask. The effect is ruined a little when Fabiola tweaks Revy's nose as punishment for "speak[ing] to the young master like that," but the fact that Revy even spoke up at all demonstrates an interest in the finer points of non-violent, non-criminal human interaction that's been mostly absent from Revy's appearances thus far. Arguably, Revy's decision to guide Fabiola in this arc (such as telling her that it was okay to "kill 'em all so there wouldn't be trouble later") may also be the result of Rock's altruistic influence, causing her to want to pass down the lessons she wishes someone had taught her when she was younger: lessons about looking out for oneself and to hell with everyone else, lessons about believing in guns over goodness. On the other hand, Revy specifically tells Fabiola at one point that she doesn't believe in Rock's faith in Garcia to resolve the situation with Roberta, so if worse comes to worst, Fabiola needs to be the "ace in the hole" by putting "a dark round hole made by a 9mm round" into Roberta's head. So it may simply be Revy hedging her bets to make sure that the situation is resolved somehow, even if it's not to the satisfaction of Rock or anyone else with idealistic notions about how the world works.
For Revy, guns ultimately continue to speak louder than words.
Strengths
Mental: Revy is obviously not a strategist like Dutch, nor a master at social psychology like Rock, but she's smart enough to keep herself alive. She was able to successfully lead Shenhua and Leigharch on an emergency mission to rescue Rock, even utilizing a certain amount of guile in neglecting to tell the two that the reason for the mission (the secret documents that Rock supposedly had) were with her all along. Being a gunslinger, Revy also has wide-ranging knowledge about firearms and most artillery in general. Although she obviously prefers her custom cutlasses, she's been seen wielding an RPG, a grenade launcher, and anti-tank rifles, among other models. A more light-hearted application of her knowledge is shown when Eda asks her what kind of gun the shepherd from the 23rd Psalm was carrying. Revy's response is a Jericho Model 941 FBL, because "Guy was Jewish, right? He would have had something from Israel."
Additionally, Revy's demonstrated some sort of "sixth sense" when it comes to recognizing either someone who is genuinely formidable (it's how she formed a strange kinship with Ginji despite neither of them speaking the other's language) or when something seems "off" about a certain situation. In the latter case, Revy usually announces that she can smell blood and/or gunsmoke in the air right before things go to hell (for instance, when Eda asks her if she can see the bounty hunters that are on their tail because they have Jane with them, Revy says that she "can smell 'em. A buncha low-life motherfuckers out for a midnight stroll"), but it can happen after the fact, as well (like when Revy and Rock arrived at the Washimine residence and Revy mentioned that the place smelled "real familiar" to her). Granted, given how the Black Lagoon series draws heavy inspiration from both American action movies and Hong Kong kung fu flicks, this particular trait of Revy's may simply be something added for dramatic flair. However, since Revy's essentially lived in an urban battleground for most of her life, it also seems reasonable to assume that her experiences have taught her to recognize signs of trouble in general.
Emotional: Revy is an extremely confident, self-assured young woman most of the time. Though she's humble enough when faced with true skill (her deference to Mr. Chang has already been mentioned, but she also admits that if Ginji hadn't been distracted by thoughts of Yukio during their match, she might have been the one six feet under instead), Revy is also extremely proud of her gunslinging talents ("Give me a gun, I'm second to none"). In light of all the crap she's been through in her life, she doesn't scare easily, either. As far as she's concerned, she (and the rest of Roanapur) are already dead anyway, so what's the point in worrying too much about her demise? Rock once accuses her of "rushing to [her] death," but Revy swiftly corrects him:
REVY:"Rushing to my death"? [...] That's a huge misunderstanding. You see, Rock...we're the walking dead. Dutch, Balalaika, Chang, and all the rest of them...everybody stuck in Roanapur all might as well be dead. If there's any difference between the rest of us and the guys gettin' eaten by bugs under their tombstones, it's just one thing. [...] Livin' or dyin', it's not that big a deal. What we should be concerned about is whether or not we're allowed to crawl to our graves. Some guys who cling too dearly to their lives let the fear get to them, they lose sight of things. If you let all that go, you can fight until the end of time.
Essentially, Revy's very good at turning off her thinking cap and simply letting her instincts and the thrill of danger carry her through her tumultuous life. If you need someone to send into the middle of a fray to "kill 'em all," Revy's your girl.
Weaknesses
Mental: Revy has no patience for most minutiae. Actually, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Revy has no patience with much of anything, including but not limited to diplomacy, tact, or introspection. Her first reaction when she realized that Sister Yolanda of the Rip-Off Church was trying to pull a fast one on the Lagoon Company's weapon orders was to whip out her guns and threaten the nun with violence. When Rock starts talking about the tea that's been served as the beginnings of his negotiation with Sister Yolanda, Revy just tells him to keep his mouth shut. Her lack of tact has been demonstrated on multiple occasions already (exhibit A: her interactions with Garcia Lovelace); her disinclination towards introspection shows up when she blows off Rock for trying to start a discussion about what it must feel like to die:
REVY: They died when they ran out of air. They felt what you feel when you're suffocating to death. People die the way they die. That's all. Thinking about shit like that won't do you any good, Rock. Keep your mind on what'll get you ahead.
And the thing that'll get you ahead, in Revy's mind, is shooting your way through obstacles. Tell her what she needs to know so she can do that, and she's reasonably satisfied.
Emotional: Revy has a hair-trigger temper, but it's based off a deeper complex at the idea of being wrong about the choices she's made and the things she believes in. In order to survive her shitty life, Revy's needed unwavering confidence in herself so she can barrel through anyone who tries to trample on her. As a result, she's adopted a simplistic "me vs. the world" mentality, which leaves no room for doubt. To her, doubt is weakness, and she refuses to be weak. And if you don't agree, well, fuck you, because as she says to Rock during their infamous argument, "this is the only way [she knows] how to live [her] life."
But while her general self-confidence is a strength, her stubborn unwillingness to see the world in different shades of grey is definitely a weakness, in that it prevents her from fully coming to terms with her past experiences. Her bouts of "Whitman fever," where her eyes go scarily blank, suggests that she uses her life of violence as a means to block out unpleasant memories from her past. Though Revy seems to have gained a little insight into her own psyche during her trip to Japan, it's doubtful that it could have explained away all of her issues with being an unloved street child. Arguably, while Revy can deal with being unloved, what she can't deal with is being completely powerless to get her way in a situation, either with or without her guns. Sometimes she just reacts with a "little" temper tantrum; other times she's reduced to spouting empty declarations of cynicism because there's nothing else she can say. Either way, her softening attitude towards Rock shows that in spite of her monstrous acts and volatile personality, there is still a shred of humanity left within her. It's just a manner of navigating a massive minefield to cultivate it.
Anything else?: Revy will be receiving her Beretta "cutlasses" in Luceti, though not immediately. Wouldn't do to have her attempting to shoot all her potential CR, after all!
SAMPLES
First Person: On the Test Flight Meme here and here!
Third Person: There were many things unfamiliar about this mission that she had been chosen for: the battleground, the opponents, the people she worked with. But the one thing that Revy recognized was the smell of blood and death, and she gravitated towards it like a homesick college student towards unhealthy comfort food.
No matter you went, Revy thought as she gunned down the last of the Third Party foot soldiers in the area, death was always the same. Anything that lived and breathed could give up the ghost in a holy baptism of bullets, whether they wore expensive Italian suits or armor that could have come right out of the Stone Age. It didn't bother her that people here were resurrected again after a week; in fact it almost gave her a perverse pleasure to think that she'd always have someone to pump lead into. And there were certainly some people she could think of back home that she'd like to pump chock full of the stuff. But they weren't here, and might never even come to this shithole, so these sorry chickens would have to do for the moment.
It had taken very little time for Revy to adjust to the fact that her opponents had the ability to go airborne. Hell, it almost made it easier for her to shoot them down, giving that she'd honed her dual-wielding skills on clay pigeons. Dealing with their little magic tricks was more of a hassle, but not excessively so, considering that Revy sometimes deliberately punched holes through their giant wings before finishing them off, just because she could. Cruel? Maybe, but who fucking cared if they were gonna end dying soon enough anyway? It wasn't such a big deal.
"Yo, Hotshot," Revy said over the communicator she'd been given, "none of these guys have the artifact things you were lookin' for."
"That's fine," came the answer from the other end. "I expected as much. Just move on and keep an eye out."
With a soft, eager chuckle, Revy put away the communicator, took her guns back up, and stalked deeper into the ruins for more prey.