❤️ Zoro ❤️

Vax: I understand my Matron.

Keyleth: *Almost Dies*

“Hello, my love, my home.”-Vax'ildan

“I’m in your hands, and I am no longer afraid”

The Twins™, based on that photo of Liam and Laura.

I’ll be your champion.

PTSD, especially Complex PTSD, can often cause a person to do things that don’t just harm themselves, but harm others as well. It can sometimes, from personal experience, feel like there is a monster inside of you or that you a monster wearing a person’s skin. With C-PTSD, which is what Percy likely suffers from, there especially tends to be a difficulty with self identification, as that long-lasting trauma and repeated stress has made you unable to fully recognise who you were before as it has practically shaped your person.

Percy is not a good person either. He’s more akin to a bad person trying to do good things, someone very morally grey. You can, of course, still be a good person with trauma, just as much as you can be a bad one, although that’s a simplification of it. The point is, there are no rules as to where you end up after experiencing something traumatic - it differs. Percy, in this case, is someone who seeks vengeance to an unhealthy degree and his morals tend to rest in a very blurry, grey area because of that. He is someone filled with anger and resentment and he can bottle that up, but eventually he completely loses it and it all spills over. He is shown to be visibly scared and panicked, but he is also shown to be aggressive and unhinged, and these are things that can and do co-exist with PTSD.

He kills his tormentors in an act of revenge and does so mercilessly, believing his actions completely justified, whether they are is a question for another day, but the point here is that Percy walks a fine line where he nearly becomes more like his tormentors. That is an experience that hits very close to home. And what I appreciate is that even after defeating Orthax, he doesn’t stop being like this. Yes, he stops his plans for revenge and manages to calm down a bit, but you can still see the trauma evident in the way he acts*, he isn’t suddenly better by defeating his inner demons, those demons go beyond a physical manifestation. Trauma doesn’t just go away, and with C-PTSD - PTSD too for that matter - because these events have shaped your life, it’s very common for them to always be there, even if you’ve managed to heal.

* Editing just to clarify that his behaviours in season two and more subtle and he seems to be back in the repressing a majority of his emotions phase. His fear of being abandoned and his impulsive behaviours are definitely still visible though and he overcompensates a lot to make up for what happened with Vex, which, considering he was in his late teens when his family died, and he’s barely in his twenties now, it’s likely he, as many traumatised individuals do, puts blame on himself for what happened to his family as a way of processing and coping, and so to have killed Vex, that’s another person he’s responsible for. The overcompensating is another thing that hits painfully close to home. He’s not suddenly better in s2 but he’s also probably scared to express himself negatively anymore after what happened previously, and thats just as harmful for him, and it won’t end well. So I’m hoping season three addresses that.

Percy shows a range of the different effects trauma has, from a scared boy to a man filled with destructive anger, and I’m glad. Every time we get a portrayal of trauma that shows all the sides of the coin, whether they be ‘pretty’ or not, I gain a few extra years to my lifespan.