What if the thing that breaks a character does not make them deeper or kinder or more understanding.
What if it just breaks them.
Not in a “fallen hero” way where everyone still totally absolutely easily sees the goodness inside them. Not in a way where the Power of Friendship patches the cracks back together after one heartfelt conversation and a cry.
What if trauma fundamentally changes the way you relate to other people forever.
What if you come out of it emotionally hollowed out, detached, angry, volatile, incapable of trusting anyone correctly anymore.
What if they do not become a better person because of what happened to them.
What if you become meaner. At best indifferent to people around you, at worst, actively dangerous.
fandom sometimes treats trauma as a sort of polishing cloth of the soul/heart. Like suffering is only acceptable or even just 'best' if it eventually transforms a character into someone cute or special and easy to love.
But sometimes terrible things do not make people more compassionate. Sometimes they just make them tired. Or cruel. Or numb. or violent..
Sometimes the thing that hurts someone permanently damages their ability to connect to others in healthy ways.
I love characters like that honestly.
Not “ooh evil morally gray babygirl,” although I love that too, but there is something deeply compelling about a person who has to consciously choose every day not to become worse than what happened to them.
A character who does not magically regain their faith in humanity. A character who does not heal neatly/nicely. A character who maybe never fully recovers at all, but still has to figure out how to exist in the world without becoming a complete threat to everyone around them.
Give me characters who survives and then realizes survival itself changed them into someone they barely recognize and that if they want to be something else they are going to have to put the work in to each action and thought and who still fucks up sometimes, often even.
Give me characters who cannot be “friendship speech”'d back into emotional acceptability or caring about their own lives or the lives of others not because they don't deserve it or to say some people can't recover but because often recovery doesn't happen through one or five or ten power of friendship speeches and sometimes it has to be under your own power and not through the power of other people talking really pretty at you.
Give me the reality of someone who has to re-build their morality and desired future selfhood manually in each interaction they have because gentleness, trust, and emotional warmth got burned out of them years ago.
That shit is fascinating.
