Hello dear artist, i'm kinda of feeling evil today 😈
Since megatron raised Nova to be an formidable warrior to fight his war (father of the year megs 😒) does she have PTSD for experiencing combat in such a young age? Like, it must take a toll on you fighting a war as a child soldier, no?
Hello! Evil ask, love it.
Small disclaimer! I am not an expert in mental disorders (or even mental health) so I might get some things wrong.
Right so, I don't believe Supernova would develop PTSD, since that tends to stem from a single defining traumatic event. C-PTSD on the other hand, comes from prolonged repeated trauma, which could be more accurate on paper, but honestly she isn't quite suffering from it either. Yes, being a soldier in a seemingly never ending war is a horrifying, soul crushing existence, but Supernova is mostly just... desensitized to it all. She didn’t experience it the way someone who enters war as an adult does. For her, the violence, the loss, the constant threats to her life is just part of a normal Tuesday, it’s all she’s ever known.
That environment has absolutely left its marks, though. She has some habits what could be described as “symptoms”, but in reality they’re just part of who she is. For example, hyper vigilance, she’s constantly reading rooms, assessing threats, and is rarely ever fully relaxed not because something is wrong with her but because that's simply how she was taught she needed to exist. Or emotional numbness in certain “horrific” scenarios, it became a survival tool so early in life that it comes natural for her. Lastly, her detached professionalism with violence, that’s just her job, nothing more to it than that.
But all of that just feels like her, just her personality. And because everyone around her is going through the same thing, she has no reference point for what a different kind of childhood could have looked like, or what a normal civilian who hasn’t gone through horrible stuff should be like, so she thinks she’s normal. Well, in the environment she’s at, she is normal.
Some more traumatic events have definitely left deeper marks than others. But she has responsibilities, expectations, and people counting on her. There's no time to process any of that, so she buries it deep and keeps going.