I've „love” reading comments from antis saying things like “The Darkling is 500 years old, he should have processed his trauma and gotten over it by now” and honestly, it’s disturbing how common this line of thinking is. Especially when it comes with the second part: “Our (enter all Grishaverse characters) have a right to be traumatized, they were just kids dragged into war.”
Yes, they were young. Yes, they suffered. No one is taking that away. But what shocks me is how quickly these same people dismiss the concept that long-term trauma doesn't fade with age. If anything, untreated trauma accumulates. It changes a person in ways that are invisible until something breaks. There is no magical threshold of years after which you're “supposed” to be healed. It doesn’t work like that. Being exposed to war, death, betrayal and existential fear for centuries without a moment of true rest or help does not heal someone. It destroys them gradually. It reshapes how they think, how they love, how they connect. Some of the most devastating cases of PTSD I’ve ever read about were people who didn’t even begin to feel the full weight of their experiences until decades later. Some were veterans of the Second World War who never spoke about what they saw until they were in their seventies or eighties, when their defenses started slipping. Some carried guilt and grief for over half a century and it still haunted them in their sleep. And those were people who had families, support, and the knowledge that the war eventually ended. Now compare that to a person who never gets peace. Never had the war end. Never had help. Someone who is constantly under threat. Who sees each generation repeat the same mistakes and bury the people they once fought beside. Who walks through the ashes of every hope and must start again, knowing how it will end. That’s not an excuse for every decision he made. But it is a necessary perspective if we’re talking about trauma. What antis are doing is trivializing the condition they claim to care about. Because if trauma only matters when it’s happening to a 20-year-old, and not to a person who’s been in survival mode for centuries, then you’ve reduced the concept of PTSD and depression to a short-term teen plot device. Some of these people don’t even realize how dehumanizing their arguments are. I’ve seen people say that age should equal healing—as if time itself is a cure. It isn’t. People live and die with trauma. They carry it into every relationship and every silence. Healing is possible, yes, but not in conditions that keep re-traumatizing you over and over again. Not in a world that refuses to change. And certainly not alone. I don’t know how anyone can genuinely think that after 500 years of war, grief, and loss, someone should have healed unless they fundamentally don’t understand what trauma is. Or unless they’ve only ever seen trauma in fiction—specifically in stories tailored to let them insert themselves into young protagonists while disregarding any character who doesn’t fit the healing narrative they prefer. This kind of thinking doesn’t come from people who understand war. It comes from people who need their heroes clean and simple, and their villains easily disposable. And that’s not analysis. That’s comfort.
