Rhys Hardcore

NAME: Rhys Hardcore
AGE: 32
OCCUPATION: Capoeira Fighter
CANONS: Black Cross (movie script) and Zeromancer (novel)


I haven’t played a serious videogame since 2010, when I kept getting my ass kicked by a multi-striking lava dragon from the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy III. Before 2010, videogames were a huge source of creative fuel for me. One franchise I don’t talk about enough is the Tekken series. The techno music, the badass fighters, the variation in martial arts, Tekken had it all. And thus we have part of the inspiration for Rhys Hardcore, a capoeira warrior who could be a throwback to Eddy Gordo in terms of how lightning fast he was. When it comes to morals, however, Rhys Hardcore was more like Heihachi Mishima, a corporate juggernaut with iron fists and concrete nuts.

Rhys didn’t start out as such a bad guy. In the 2008 movie script Black Cross, he was just a regular capoeira master who was hired by a corporation to keep the peace between two tribes of warriors who were set to do battle in a big name arena. The capoeira fighter then known as Reis Porrada (King of Hardcore in Brazilian) was damn good at his job: whenever the tribes fought in the locker room, he beat the shit out of all of them. He didn’t beat them badly enough to hospitalize them, but just enough to teach them to follow Reis’s law.

Following this man’s law would be an even more valuable asset in the novel incarnation of Zeromancer, where the now Americanized Rhys Hardcore was a ruthless gangster with equal parts violence and shallowness. He didn’t have rivalries with other gangs. He instead declared war on people who were ugly or poor. He would throw parties with his gang in the most inconvenient places and tossed out all the undesirables before he actually set up shop.

When three lizards named Zuga Edai, XX Shiva, and Diesel Reznor refused to comply with Rhys’ orders, the three “hideous” warriors were locked in one of his dungeons and tortured until they either died from extreme pain or a broken heart. Zuga managed to get out alive, but the hell Rhys Hardcore put him through was enough to make the orc wizard into a permanent sourpuss. Nobody wanted to be around Zuga anymore. Hell, Zuga didn’t even want to be around himself anymore. Thanks, Rhys Hardcore. You’ve taught us once again that the upper 1% can do whatever the hell they want while anybody slightly beneath them is destined for a lifetime of sorrow.

Because I currently have a shortage of male villains in my archives, Rhys Hardcore will have to be assigned to that particular grouping. And why wouldn’t he be? He demands conformity from people who can’t change their circumstances and beats the shit out of them when they don’t. If the corrupt Wall Street bankers had capoeira skills, good looks, and treated every place they went to like a Miami pool party, then they would be perfect carbon copies of Rhys Hardcore. And really, isn’t perfection what we all should strive for? Shouldn’t we all just get in a big group and meld into each other until we’re all one big pool of perfection? While perfection may be nice to a lot of people, the word “perfect” is an insult to those who strive for individuality. Try telling this to Rhys Hardcore, the capoeira gangster with millions of dollars, millions of cars, and a craving for enough power to control the entire solar system (despite those planets not being terra-formed just yet).

You’ve read this far into my character analysis and are probably wondering if I created Rhys Hardcore just for the sake of having a rich whipping boy (because I’m obviously not rich myself). You’re wondering if I’m harboring any jealousy toward the top 1%. While it’d be nice to have that much disposable income, the less successful have talents and dreams of their own to where they don’t necessarily need that much money to survive. People like to look their noses down on welfare recipients while I on the other hand see untapped potential. When you tap into a source of creative fuel and it’s rich in nutrients, then the future can be a bright place for a lot of people. Rhys Hardcore doesn’t want you to tap into that potential, yet he’s more than willing to call you lazy even though he was the one who stopped you from succeeding.

So the answer to your lingering questions is no, I’m not jealous of the top 1%, because none of those people could measure up to the hype that Rhys Hardcore brings about. Rhys is the ultimate villain-sue: he knows martial arts, he has all the money in the world, and people do what he wants while those who question him are tortured and killed. If Rhys Hardcore was a real person, we’d all be fucked. His realness is the difference between the world ending slowly and naturally and the world ending in an instant cluster fuck of chaos.

　

***MOVIE DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***

RANDAL: I remember that night we went to Julie Dwyer’s funeral, you were all like, “I need to shit or get off the pot!”

DANTE: You said shit or get off the pot, not me!

RANDAL: You got all fired up about taking charge of your life and what did you do? You worked at the Quick Stop until it burned to the fucking ground!

DANTE: I took courses that broke down!

RANDAL: And then you dropped out!

DANTE: Because you stopped going!

RANDAL: Because we were just killing time with those classes! One semester we took fucking criminology, for Christ’s sake! Who the fuck are we training to be: Batman?!

-Clerks II-