Trauma and Choice
Mar. 31st, 2022 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zaliachimeraIt's me making my twice yearly attempt to use Dreamwidth for more than RP XD
The most recent storyline in Destiny, or well, some of the responses to it, got me angry and thinking about how terrible a lot of fandom (and fans more generally) are about understanding characters with trauma. And characters who don't make 100% objectively correct choices in general.
And to be honest, are bad at understanding when there is no 100% objectively correct choice.
This mainly rambling, not in-depth meta analysis, and I'm putting it under the cut for spoilers for Destiny up to this point, and the Magnus Archives.
Destiny especially requires a decent bit of background for which I apologise. It is a fucking nuts canon and I kind of love it.
Background
Destiny is an MMO FPS RPG which has eaten my life since Christmas.
A few hundred years ago, an entity called The Traveller which appears as a giant white sphere, appeared in Earth's vicinity and with it's help this ushered in a golden age for humanity. It terraformed Mercury, Venus, Mars and a bunch of moons. The the Darkness came, caused a cataclysm which sent humanity back into a dark age for another few centuries.
During the dark age, the Traveller sent out these floating robot beings called 'Ghosts' to ressurrect dead humans (and human-adjacent beings, the Awoken and Exos) and grant them the Light, creating Guardians. Guardians when they are resurrected retain basically no memories of who they were before death (there's even a Guardian who died in Ancient Egypt). For all intents and purposes, they are new people. They have space magic powers, and their ghosts can heal them and bring them back to life repeatedly.
One of those Guardians is called Crow. He is exactly my type of character and no-one should be surprised that I love him.
Crow's original life was not back in the dark age, or the golden age, or ancient egypt or anything. Crow used to be Uldren Sov, Prince of the Awoken.
Uldren was a dick. He was also driven insane and manipulated by a reality warping dragon who said he could bring his sister back to life. During that time he murdered another Guardian permanently - Cayde-6.
Cayde was played by Nathan Fillion originally and is exactly the sort of character that implies. He was super popular both to fans, and with characters in the game. Was one of the leaders of the Guardians and the Last City. The player character then hunted Uldren down and killed him.
Whoops, a ghost (eventually called Glint who is *adorable*) resurrects him. He has no memories of anything Uldren did. Is essentially a new person who gains the name Crow.
Crow tries to go to the Last City, where Guardians tend to be based, and discovers that he is hated. He is killed multiple times, sometimes brutally, by various Guardians who recognise him. Eventually he flees, ends up literally floating in space, dying and being revived by Glint, until he is 'rescued' by a gangster known as Spider.
Spider enslaves and abuses Crow (including putting a bomb into Glint's shell so Crow can't leave), physically and mentally. Crow eventually meets a Guardian called Osiris who becomes his mentor, and eventually helps to free Crow, and takes him to the Last City. But he has to hide his face all the time. Osiris has him be a bodyguard to the Guardian commander Zavala, whose life Crow saves from a couple of assassins. But he's very aware that some people know who he was and won't tell him.
Then boom, turns out his mentor and protector Osiris was actually an impostor all along and is one of the greatest threats Guardians have ever faced - Savathun, the Hive Queen of lies and deceit. He's been manipulated!
During the course of the next few seasons, Crow finds out who he was pre-death, Savathun restores his memories of Uldren and he has to deal with knowing all the awful shit Uldren did.
And all of this happens within the space of 3-10 years, depending on how long each season supposedly lasts.
Dude is traumatised as fuck.
Recent Season
In the currently ongoing season, the Guardians are working with former enemies, the Cabal, and their new Empress Caiatl, and capturing members of an alien species called the Hive to essentially rip intel out of their minds. The Hive we're capturing have somehow started using the Light (that thing from the Traveller that Guardians use to resurrect themselves and use space magic).
Crow is... really uncomfortable with this. He considers it torture. And also, the Light gave him a second chance, is it really right to do this to the Hive lightbearers? What if this could be a second chance for them? (Also it's kind of a war crime, y'know?).
He attempts to shut down the program, which kills the Psion (Cabal telepath) Caiatl had sent to pull the info out of the Hive's minds. Caiatl wants his life in recompense, Zavala nearly breaks the alliance with the Cabal because he isn't willing to sacrifice one of his people. Another Guardian, Lord Saladin (who was alive during the dark age as one of the Iron Lords who tried to keep peace), who has been 'mentoring' Crow offers his life instead. Caiatl accepts and made Saladin part of her War Council.
Reactions
A lot of the reactions I saw to this were really dunking on Crow. Called him an idiot, really hate him for Uldren killing Cayde still. And absolutely couldn't understand why Crow would make such an 'obviously bad' choice.
And I'm here... okay, Crow shouldn't have done this. He didn't know it would kill the Psion, but it was still a poorly thought out plan. And it risked an important alliance.
But also a lot of factors come into play here:
1. He has been alive, as Crow, for less than 10 years. Even Saladin says it - they gave a 4 year old a gun and all this responsibility and expected him to act as though he had literal centuries of experience.
2. Crow has spent a decent chunk of his few years being abused and used as a slave. I think I can see why he might be uncomfortable with seeing other sentient beings captured and held prisoner to have their minds stripped of useful intel.
3. He got his second chance by becoming a Lightbearer. These Hive also have the Light. It's really easy to understand why he might feel some empathy towards the Hive lightbearers considering his own circumstances. People have called the Hive monsters, and talked about how they'll kill people, but Crow was repeatedly killed and hurt by human/Exo/Awoken Guardians using the Light as well.
4. During his time working for the Last City, he's seen an alliance with some of the Eliksni (an alien race who were enemies of humans) and an alliance with the Cabal (who were the main enemy at the start of Destiny 2 when they caged the Traveller and took the light away from all Guardians, and took over the Last City). Is there any reason he should assume that the Hive lightbearers are completely irredeemable and deserve the treatment they're getting?
5. Crow has very recently felt someone (Savathun) reach into his head and poke at his mind. It was apparently an unpleasant experience. I am not surprised he had a reaction to the 'good' guys doing the same thing to an enemy.
6. Saladin your story was stupid and your take away from the experience should probably have been 'maybe we shouldn't just leave traumatised children alone in the wilds after implying to them that killing your enemies was the best thing to do' rather than 'actually the problem would have been solved if I'd just murdered the traumatised kid'.
But yes, I think Crow has a lot of very good reasons for his actions. They're not always great actions. But there really wasn't an objectively correct course of action here. And with his experiences... yeah, it makes sense why he made the choices he did.
Saladin's actions are also understandable (and also informed by massive trauma). But the empathetic response Crow makes is the one that gets called stupid and wrong. The one which advocates killing enemies first, and using any means necessary is the one which fans see as objectively the right choice.
The Magnus Archives
Saw this a lot in the Magnus Archives fandom too.
At the end of Season 1, one of the characters, Sasha, gets replaced by an entity called the Not-Them: a monster which rewrites reality and memory so it had always been Sasha (no-one remembers the original Sasha, all images and recordings with a few exceptions have been replaced). The Not-Them was bound to an artefact, a table with a spider-web type pattern, which kept it somewhat constrained and trapped.
At the end of Season 2, the main character, Jon Sims, discovers that Sasha is Not Sasha. He is just getting a feel for how the monsters in the world work, and decides that destroying the table is how you destroy the Not-Them.
He is wrong. This frees the Not-Them. Bad things ensue.
I have seen Jon called stupid for this choice so many goddam times. So many comments about what an idiot he is, and how obvious it is that destroying the table will free the Not-Them, how stupid of him, ahahaha!
This reaction ignores just... so goddam much.
On the purely Watsonian side:
1. Jon had a massively traumatic experience as an 8 year old with a Web related artefact - a book which tried to mind control and abduct him. This trauma never left him. He still carries a massive mistrust of web things, spiders, etc. and also still blames himself for not saving the 19 year old bully who knocked the evil book out of his hands and got abducted instead.
2. Dude has been driven to massive paranoia during the course of the series by the Not-Them being there.
3. The Not-Them has basically been gaslighting him for a year, including dropping hints that the table is evil and should be destroyed, as well as stoking and feeding off his fear and paranoia. He's also seen the Not-Them talk about the table, and seem drawn to it repeatedly. Almost as if it's connected.
4. His boss, Elias, has also been gaslighting and manipulating him since he started working at his job, and deliberately encouraged his paranoia and fear of the Not-Them. Elias knew the Not-Them was there the whole time, and actively wanted it to terrify Jon.
5. Jon was just figuring out the entities and how they worked, feeling out the edges of their nightmare/fairytale logic. He is actually pretty genre savvy - but he thinks he's in a ghost story, not a cosmic horror.
In ghost stories, and fairytales, often destroying an item does destroy the evil thing connected to it. It isn't a terrible leap of logic to make.
Trauma affects your choices! You can't make choices in a vaccuum completely unaffected by your life experiences!
On the Doylist side:
Holy shit people, you need to realise that you are listening to this podcast in your living room, with as much time as you want between episodes. You can relisten to episodes if you miss something! You can talk with other people about it! You can go have a snack!
You aren't working a job where your boss's goal is to actively traumatise you, you're being supernaturally influenced by multiple monsters, the horrible things happening to you are occuring in real time, and you still have to go to work and make rent!
Jon (and the other characters) can't sit down and relisten to their own lives (okay... technically the tape recorders and all but...). They can't take a week, two weeks, to comb back through everything they've said and done to figure out a story twist, and have a nice little snack while they discuss with friends on Discord.
It's not stupidity, it's actually having to live events.
Apologies for the length, and that it is mostly rant. Just something I needed to get off my chest so hopefully I can stop making myself angry in my own head.
The most recent storyline in Destiny, or well, some of the responses to it, got me angry and thinking about how terrible a lot of fandom (and fans more generally) are about understanding characters with trauma. And characters who don't make 100% objectively correct choices in general.
And to be honest, are bad at understanding when there is no 100% objectively correct choice.
This mainly rambling, not in-depth meta analysis, and I'm putting it under the cut for spoilers for Destiny up to this point, and the Magnus Archives.
Destiny especially requires a decent bit of background for which I apologise. It is a fucking nuts canon and I kind of love it.
Background
Destiny is an MMO FPS RPG which has eaten my life since Christmas.
A few hundred years ago, an entity called The Traveller which appears as a giant white sphere, appeared in Earth's vicinity and with it's help this ushered in a golden age for humanity. It terraformed Mercury, Venus, Mars and a bunch of moons. The the Darkness came, caused a cataclysm which sent humanity back into a dark age for another few centuries.
During the dark age, the Traveller sent out these floating robot beings called 'Ghosts' to ressurrect dead humans (and human-adjacent beings, the Awoken and Exos) and grant them the Light, creating Guardians. Guardians when they are resurrected retain basically no memories of who they were before death (there's even a Guardian who died in Ancient Egypt). For all intents and purposes, they are new people. They have space magic powers, and their ghosts can heal them and bring them back to life repeatedly.
One of those Guardians is called Crow. He is exactly my type of character and no-one should be surprised that I love him.
Crow's original life was not back in the dark age, or the golden age, or ancient egypt or anything. Crow used to be Uldren Sov, Prince of the Awoken.
Uldren was a dick. He was also driven insane and manipulated by a reality warping dragon who said he could bring his sister back to life. During that time he murdered another Guardian permanently - Cayde-6.
Cayde was played by Nathan Fillion originally and is exactly the sort of character that implies. He was super popular both to fans, and with characters in the game. Was one of the leaders of the Guardians and the Last City. The player character then hunted Uldren down and killed him.
Whoops, a ghost (eventually called Glint who is *adorable*) resurrects him. He has no memories of anything Uldren did. Is essentially a new person who gains the name Crow.
Crow tries to go to the Last City, where Guardians tend to be based, and discovers that he is hated. He is killed multiple times, sometimes brutally, by various Guardians who recognise him. Eventually he flees, ends up literally floating in space, dying and being revived by Glint, until he is 'rescued' by a gangster known as Spider.
Spider enslaves and abuses Crow (including putting a bomb into Glint's shell so Crow can't leave), physically and mentally. Crow eventually meets a Guardian called Osiris who becomes his mentor, and eventually helps to free Crow, and takes him to the Last City. But he has to hide his face all the time. Osiris has him be a bodyguard to the Guardian commander Zavala, whose life Crow saves from a couple of assassins. But he's very aware that some people know who he was and won't tell him.
Then boom, turns out his mentor and protector Osiris was actually an impostor all along and is one of the greatest threats Guardians have ever faced - Savathun, the Hive Queen of lies and deceit. He's been manipulated!
During the course of the next few seasons, Crow finds out who he was pre-death, Savathun restores his memories of Uldren and he has to deal with knowing all the awful shit Uldren did.
And all of this happens within the space of 3-10 years, depending on how long each season supposedly lasts.
Dude is traumatised as fuck.
Recent Season
In the currently ongoing season, the Guardians are working with former enemies, the Cabal, and their new Empress Caiatl, and capturing members of an alien species called the Hive to essentially rip intel out of their minds. The Hive we're capturing have somehow started using the Light (that thing from the Traveller that Guardians use to resurrect themselves and use space magic).
Crow is... really uncomfortable with this. He considers it torture. And also, the Light gave him a second chance, is it really right to do this to the Hive lightbearers? What if this could be a second chance for them? (Also it's kind of a war crime, y'know?).
He attempts to shut down the program, which kills the Psion (Cabal telepath) Caiatl had sent to pull the info out of the Hive's minds. Caiatl wants his life in recompense, Zavala nearly breaks the alliance with the Cabal because he isn't willing to sacrifice one of his people. Another Guardian, Lord Saladin (who was alive during the dark age as one of the Iron Lords who tried to keep peace), who has been 'mentoring' Crow offers his life instead. Caiatl accepts and made Saladin part of her War Council.
Reactions
A lot of the reactions I saw to this were really dunking on Crow. Called him an idiot, really hate him for Uldren killing Cayde still. And absolutely couldn't understand why Crow would make such an 'obviously bad' choice.
And I'm here... okay, Crow shouldn't have done this. He didn't know it would kill the Psion, but it was still a poorly thought out plan. And it risked an important alliance.
But also a lot of factors come into play here:
1. He has been alive, as Crow, for less than 10 years. Even Saladin says it - they gave a 4 year old a gun and all this responsibility and expected him to act as though he had literal centuries of experience.
2. Crow has spent a decent chunk of his few years being abused and used as a slave. I think I can see why he might be uncomfortable with seeing other sentient beings captured and held prisoner to have their minds stripped of useful intel.
3. He got his second chance by becoming a Lightbearer. These Hive also have the Light. It's really easy to understand why he might feel some empathy towards the Hive lightbearers considering his own circumstances. People have called the Hive monsters, and talked about how they'll kill people, but Crow was repeatedly killed and hurt by human/Exo/Awoken Guardians using the Light as well.
4. During his time working for the Last City, he's seen an alliance with some of the Eliksni (an alien race who were enemies of humans) and an alliance with the Cabal (who were the main enemy at the start of Destiny 2 when they caged the Traveller and took the light away from all Guardians, and took over the Last City). Is there any reason he should assume that the Hive lightbearers are completely irredeemable and deserve the treatment they're getting?
5. Crow has very recently felt someone (Savathun) reach into his head and poke at his mind. It was apparently an unpleasant experience. I am not surprised he had a reaction to the 'good' guys doing the same thing to an enemy.
6. Saladin your story was stupid and your take away from the experience should probably have been 'maybe we shouldn't just leave traumatised children alone in the wilds after implying to them that killing your enemies was the best thing to do' rather than 'actually the problem would have been solved if I'd just murdered the traumatised kid'.
But yes, I think Crow has a lot of very good reasons for his actions. They're not always great actions. But there really wasn't an objectively correct course of action here. And with his experiences... yeah, it makes sense why he made the choices he did.
Saladin's actions are also understandable (and also informed by massive trauma). But the empathetic response Crow makes is the one that gets called stupid and wrong. The one which advocates killing enemies first, and using any means necessary is the one which fans see as objectively the right choice.
The Magnus Archives
Saw this a lot in the Magnus Archives fandom too.
At the end of Season 1, one of the characters, Sasha, gets replaced by an entity called the Not-Them: a monster which rewrites reality and memory so it had always been Sasha (no-one remembers the original Sasha, all images and recordings with a few exceptions have been replaced). The Not-Them was bound to an artefact, a table with a spider-web type pattern, which kept it somewhat constrained and trapped.
At the end of Season 2, the main character, Jon Sims, discovers that Sasha is Not Sasha. He is just getting a feel for how the monsters in the world work, and decides that destroying the table is how you destroy the Not-Them.
He is wrong. This frees the Not-Them. Bad things ensue.
I have seen Jon called stupid for this choice so many goddam times. So many comments about what an idiot he is, and how obvious it is that destroying the table will free the Not-Them, how stupid of him, ahahaha!
This reaction ignores just... so goddam much.
On the purely Watsonian side:
1. Jon had a massively traumatic experience as an 8 year old with a Web related artefact - a book which tried to mind control and abduct him. This trauma never left him. He still carries a massive mistrust of web things, spiders, etc. and also still blames himself for not saving the 19 year old bully who knocked the evil book out of his hands and got abducted instead.
2. Dude has been driven to massive paranoia during the course of the series by the Not-Them being there.
3. The Not-Them has basically been gaslighting him for a year, including dropping hints that the table is evil and should be destroyed, as well as stoking and feeding off his fear and paranoia. He's also seen the Not-Them talk about the table, and seem drawn to it repeatedly. Almost as if it's connected.
4. His boss, Elias, has also been gaslighting and manipulating him since he started working at his job, and deliberately encouraged his paranoia and fear of the Not-Them. Elias knew the Not-Them was there the whole time, and actively wanted it to terrify Jon.
5. Jon was just figuring out the entities and how they worked, feeling out the edges of their nightmare/fairytale logic. He is actually pretty genre savvy - but he thinks he's in a ghost story, not a cosmic horror.
In ghost stories, and fairytales, often destroying an item does destroy the evil thing connected to it. It isn't a terrible leap of logic to make.
Trauma affects your choices! You can't make choices in a vaccuum completely unaffected by your life experiences!
On the Doylist side:
Holy shit people, you need to realise that you are listening to this podcast in your living room, with as much time as you want between episodes. You can relisten to episodes if you miss something! You can talk with other people about it! You can go have a snack!
You aren't working a job where your boss's goal is to actively traumatise you, you're being supernaturally influenced by multiple monsters, the horrible things happening to you are occuring in real time, and you still have to go to work and make rent!
Jon (and the other characters) can't sit down and relisten to their own lives (okay... technically the tape recorders and all but...). They can't take a week, two weeks, to comb back through everything they've said and done to figure out a story twist, and have a nice little snack while they discuss with friends on Discord.
It's not stupidity, it's actually having to live events.
Apologies for the length, and that it is mostly rant. Just something I needed to get off my chest so hopefully I can stop making myself angry in my own head.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-31 04:28 pm (UTC)Haha, I need to write some things down in my own DW at some point too...I just keep waiting for this one bit of news that seems to be slow to form to really do so because it will give me something at least to talk about more if it turns out to be true! XD
no subject
Date: 2022-04-02 02:51 pm (UTC)Ooooh, I hope the news is good and that it comes soon!!