>>6248284>>6248290>>6248295>TRAUMAYou should have sadomasochistic sex with your psychotherapist, this cures everything
I shall recommend you two lengthy essays, first this one from the New Yorker
https://archive.ph/fdQfkhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plotThe Case Against the Trauma Plot
Fiction writers love it. Filmmakers can’t resist it. But does this trope deepen characters, or flatten them into a set of symptoms? (...)
and then this one written by Will Self
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/a-posthumous-shock-trauma-studies-modernity-how-everything-became-trauma/The two essays explore the propensity in modern literature to extol victimisation characters who suffer and relive from some unspeakable suppressed backstory TRAUMA, ordeal or childhood abuse. There is a question of whether this tendency to endlessly relive and replay trauma is a modern phenomenon, exacerbated by the advent of technology and its effectiveness and vividness on resurfacing memory (does film, photography heighten / trigger trauma? Did Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Shakespeare even experience trauma in the way we understand it?) as well as an intriguing examination of the MORAL FLATTENING aspect of trauma (eg a psychotherapist might treat both the perpetrator of an atrocity, eg a soldier with PTSD, alongside the victim). Observe that trauma requires a distinct sense of chronology and timekeeping in temporal sequence, a strong sense of past present future and causation etc. as well as established roles of victim and aggressor. There is a theory of the extent to which a society of spectacle, creating an audience of endlessly shocked bystanders / observers etc., promulgates trauma
How to use this in fantasy roleplaying games? George Lucas himself in his own words describes Star Wars as created and shaped by his reaction to the Vietnam War (same with Game Of Thrones, GRR Martin). I analysed in past qtgs how Harry Potter only created and shaped after JK Rowling was traumatised by her abusive (?) Portuguese journalist husband (she hates journalists). The only way in which you will ever formulate the next gargantuan fantasy franchise is by being beaten and physically slapped in the face by your foreigner husband after you start World War III. So get to it, what are you waiting for?
