How to Explain the Origin of Your Nemesis

I recently saw Black Widow, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

I bring this up because there’s a character in it who we are meant to like and root for, who is highly proficient with knives. In one scene this character ends a fight with a knife attack across the opponent’s belly that, in a hard-R movie, would have requires a special effects artist to spend days perfecting their disembowelment splatter animation.

Black Widow was not a hard-R movie, so the opponent who received this attack clutched their midsection, groaned, fell over, and died with almost no blood. The victim did have enough life left in them to say a few words to their attacker. As they opened their mouth to speak, I was kind of hoping they would say, “Why am I not bleeding more? That’s weird, right?!”

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