Dreamer's Lair

highly recommend: making that character’s mourning WORSE!!!! make them play pretend with that corpse. make it seem like they’re moving on until they start telling the new person to start dyeing their hair the color of the person they lost and start calling them their name to make it clear that they’re hanging out with this person now to try and make them into the old one. make your grieving character put people in the same situation the person they’re mourning died in and have them hope they die to prove it was unpreventable. make your grieving character put people in the same situation the person they’re mourning died in and have them hope they live to prove that it wasn’t doomed to happened. make your grieving characters actively harm the people around them and the memory of the person they lost. I love you morally dubious grieving characters

what’s the point of giving your character severe trauma if it doesn’t make them an asshole to work with. not in a cute way. they should be a fucking cunt. they have to make problems on purpose. they have to lash out at their friends without even being provoked, just because they’re having a bad day and they want to hurt someone to cope with it. on purpose. they have to want to hurt someone on purpose. they can regret it later, but they can’t just say something mean on accident, it has to be calculated and cruel and so, so intentional.

Are your characters fucking in spite of The Horrors, or are they fucking because of The Horrors?

There is a third thing to consider.

Far worse, in my opinion, than the famous “he wouldn’t fucking say that” is “he WOULD fucking say that, as part of his facade, but you seem to think he would mean it genuinely”