There's nothing like the vaguely sadistic pleasure of a good revenge movie, from Uma Thurman hacking the limbs off the entire Japanese mafia to any of the 36 vengeance-crazed madmen Mel Gibson has played. But it's all fantasy, right? Real people don't go on a Payback-style path of destruction when they're wronged.

6 The Trung Sisters' Kung Fu Rebellion

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Trung Trac and Trung Nhi were simple-living sisters in a small village sometime in first century Vietnam, who by the way had been trained from childhood in martial arts. This will become very important later.

The area at the time was ruled with an iron fist by the Chinese, who had a kind of zero tolerance policy when it came to their subsidiaries acting like they were all unique and independent. So when Trac's husband broke with convention and took a stand, the Han warlords decided to respond with a display of brutality that would have done the Roman Empire proud.

They executed the outspoken rebel, and then went ahead and raped his widow Trac because why not.



OK, see this? This is my ass kicking face.

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The Payback:

We now take it as pretty common knowledge that you just don't mess with Vietnam, even if you're an immensely powerful and technologically superior nation. They know kung fu, or something, and apparently every time they get invaded they simply level up.

Due to their traditional Confucian teachings, the Han Chinese considered women to be pretty useless. So they didn't realize that Trac and Nhi had been schooled in badass martial arts since they were little girls and thus weren't prepared to take any of Confucius' shit.