sburb is fucking amateur hour compared to long term neglect and physical abuse :^) Spoiler also the puppet shit counts as sexual abuse right
yeah, that's why i headcanon dave as having C-PTSD, 'cause it shows up more in kids with regular, repetitive traumas like bro's whole...debacle... and then PTSD for the relatively singular trauma of sburb
Spoiler: sexual abuse discussion yes totally 100% sexual abuse being constantly exposed to sex toys by a grown man who likes to keep you in place and attack you with knives god bro was a really fucked up character
this is like, back in the fantasy and not in "real fucked up shit that could actually happen to someone" territory, but does Dave get the memories of the timeclones or is that just fanon? imagine being able to recall several iterations of your own (probably violent, painful) death I only died once and I'm still kinda fucked up about it Spoiler knowing the contents of the cal juju make it almost worse, considering caliborn and gamzee are both on record for wanting to do horrible, horrible things to Dave. and also arqius who is...gross in general. guh.
@KingStarscream From Black Jewels, rather random: Jeanelle: All the depression, holy PTSD batman! Lucivar: PTSD, pretty much. Marian: Some depression, lots of anxiety. Luthvian: Something anxiety flavoured that manifests as aggression. Maaaybe something BPDish with how she relates to people, especially people close to her but I wouldn´t like to say for certain.
If we're talking time travel PTSD I have headcanons for my fave which I have alluded to several times in this thread a long time ago but have not previously elaborated on. Hoo boy do I have headcanons.
doesn't he canon have a traumatic brain injury? that would account for his behavior (though i don't mean he can't have autism and adhd also)
yes he does i like to think he had the stuff before and the brain injury made the symptoms a lot more debilitating
So tl;dr in Radiant Historia time travel works by, essentially, savescumming. If everything goes pear-shaped, a time traveler can go back in time and change the event that screwed everything over- sometimes that's just a matter of "make a different decision," but sometimes it requires a lot more work. The result of this is that the game has no less than 24 bad ends where the world ends because you make the wrong decision, plus several dead ends in the main story that require going back in time to change an event. And a pretty big percentage of those dead timelines, for obvious reasons, involve the main character's friends and loved ones dying. He kills his best friend with his own hands, another of his friends betrays him and systematically murders the entire rest of the group, he's held prisoner in an alternate dimension, his friends kill each other, his friends die around him, his friends die when he tries to throw himself in harm's way to help them, he turns on his country and assassinates 2/3 of the national leadership. And then he goes back and has to pretend none of it ever happened. Because, technically, it didn't. And this is a guy who's pretty easy to read as being in a bad mental health place to start with- there's a couple of lines early on that suggest he's been the sole survivor of military operations or black ops missions at least once before and avoids working in teams because he's afraid it'll happen again, and he has so little regard for his own life that his tendency to get himself nearly killed is something of a fandom in-joke. (To those this means something to, when @keltena was first playing it, they compared him to Shirou Emiya.) He has exactly two friends at the start of the game, both of whom express a lot of worry about this behavior, and he textually thinks he's not a good person. Spoiler Oh, and he's from a wildly dysfunctional family, and is currently under the thumb of an emotionally abusive relative who projects onto him to such a degree that they erased his memories to make him behave how they wanted him to. And his dad murdered him. I am firmly convinced he is a great big touch-starved ball of repressed trauma who occasionally has screaming nightmares (some of which he can't even remember), and has been known to suddenly excuse himself from things for no reason anyone else can guess, then turn invisible and find a corner and curl up in a ball until he stops shaking. He won't go anywhere without a weapon, and he's got a lot of vague triggers that he avoids without telling anyone, so nobody can figure out why he never eats at this one place or avoids talking to this one guy or suddenly stopped sparring with his friends. (I also headcanon that he spends most of the time when he's back in time and reliving prior events basically being forced to dissociate. Reliving something he can't change is like being stuck in the back of his own head, watching himself go through the thoughts and emotions and actions he took at the time.)
I HAVE MANY HEADCANONS ABOUT THIS GAME, OKAY. #small fandom special interest woes (Canon doesn't really dig into how screwed-up Stocke is, to the point that I think a lot of it might have been accidental on the writers' part, but I don't think I'm reaching much- it's really easy to read him as kind of a mess, especially the closer you look at his backstory and relationships.)
Look, if Atlus didn't want us to read in increasingly horrifying subtext between every line of their little unknown JRPG, they shouldn't have made it so astoundingly easy. Like, I know overanalyzing every detail is my stock in trade, but it still says something that I was firmly convinced that their stoic badass hero was Not Okay before I'd even finished the first mission. More specifically, he's held prisoner in an alternate dimension by yet another friend so that he can't go get himself killed. In case that particular item was standing out to you as less fucked up than the others.
EXACTLY. And he ends that first mission by almost bleeding to death because he was more focused on saving some people he barely knew than on the fact that he'd been stabbed. And the friend is a nine-year-old child.
(There's several other RH characters who I refuse to believe do not have some degree of PTSD; notably, Raynie, the party black mage, is a refugee who lived on the streets in a city where child slavery is legal, grew up, joined a mercenary company, and then was one of only two survivors of a mine collapse that killed the entire rest of the company. When the plot inevitably sends you through a mine, she spends the entire time on edge and panicking. You will pry my PTSD and claustrophobia headcanons about her from my cold dead hands. And then there's Eruca, and while a full explanation for her would be a mess of spoiler tags, I think it's a decent starting point to mention that in the scene where she's introduced, her stepmother casually threatens to kill her for disagreeing about the national budget.)
