#traumatised characters

I have a complicated relationship with books. When I was a kid, I devoured them, I wouldn't discriminate, whatever I could get my hands on would be gone within hours. I took pride in my reading and what I gained from it. It was a huge part of my life and personality. And then my mental health started to get real bad. And I got bored and couldn't concentrate for long enough to sit and read a whole book. But mostly I got tired of books where I could guess what was gonna happen. I knew the patterns of ya fantasy or romance or dystopia or those new mental health books that made metaphors out of like a repeated motif of toast or whatever. I could always guess the ending and it left a bland taste in my mouth. I didn't want escapism anymore, I just wanted something new. I wanted characters I could relate to. I wanted nuance in a way that didn't feel performative. And now I'm neck deep in tma and I'm getting back into reading, trying to find books with queer poc, trying to read new genres (im getting more into horror), trying to read books with characters who feel real. And honestly tma played a huge role in getting me back into reading. The characters are what made me stick with it. I could talk forever and ever about how much I love when a story focuses on how a character changes within the plot, how they react to things, how they interact with others, how that is compared to other characters. I love reading about trauma responses and unreliable narrators and people making the best choices they can with the resources they have and royally fucking up and falling in love and hating themself and hating other characters and falling apart and bringing themself back together and positive character development and negative character development. That's the shit that gets me going. The fact that tma did all of that? Makes me feel like a kid again, flipping through the same Scooby Doo annual over and over.

as somebody who had a fucked-up childhood, as somebody who had absent parents, as somebody who has experienced multiple traumas, as somebody who survived a fire, as somebody who lost someone and is still trying to deal with that loss, as somebody who lost someone and wanted someone to blame, as somebody who grew up in the welfare system, as somebody whose parents fucked up big time, as somebody whose own teenage child pulled away from them, as somebody who has made huge mistakes, as somebody who is fully grown yet still very much figuring themselves out, as somebody queer who only actually fully came out later in life, as somebody with an alive father who craves a father figure in their life, as somebody with daddy issues, as somebody who just wants to have fun with someone lovely, as somebody who dreams of having a partner in life who really truly sees them, as somebody who knows there are so many others out there just like them, as somebody who feels and feels and feels and feels—oh man 9-1-1 s7e10 all fall down sure was An Episode.

People will be like "nah, I don't have trauma" and then turn around and say they relate to Hunter Noceda/Clawthorne