Satisfying reprisals

My telenovela is far from over but I've already started speculating happily about what kind of terrible end its villains will come to.

The nigh-incontrovertible rule of telenovelas is: The badder you are, the worse you die.

As I've written before, I saw one villainess trampled by a horse into a bloody pool of mush in a stable; one pair of villains got leprosy AND were shot AND fell off a very high statue onto a stone pavement (and still lived to give defiant, unrepentant speeches before dying); one pair of high-falutin cronies got toted off to jail in sackcloth and executed.

An exception to the DEAD rule was Rubi, who destroyed everybody's life with her great beauty. (It wasn't the GUYS' fault, of course, they couldn't help themselves...) Rubi fell through glass or over a high stair railing or something and survived, BUT SHE WASN'T BEAUTIFUL ANY MORE. The reason they let her live was that they planned a sequel...

UPDATE: My dear friends who watch telenovas have left me these wonderful examples.

How very much more satisfactory this is than real life. In the world I observe empirically, evil certainly often seems to triumph. The evil live to play golf another day.

Remember that song, "Farther Along" ?

Tempted and tried, we're oft made to wonder,
Why it should be thus, all the day long;
While there are others, living about us
Never molested, though in the wrong.

Farther along, we'll know all about it.
Farther along, we'll understand why,
Cheer up my brothers, walk in the sunshine
We'll understand it all, by and by.

Heaven had to be invented to right the wrongs we see in this world. If we insist that everything comes out fair "in the end," then "in the end" has to be extended past the time we ourselves can see.

In the telenovela world, you don't have to wait that long. Qué rico!

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