*shows up to battle in the eleventh hour with my ghost army*
why are we having a conversation about maedhros’ ptsd and how it should be written when it’s already written very clearly in canon? by an author who had ptsd?
i think we’re all approaching the term ptsd as a broad term referring to maedhros’ trauma and the mental effects that had on him instead of as a very clear and understood spectrum of symptoms.
ptsd is a term that, somewhat like ocd, has been stripped of it’s actual definition, and i think a lot of the problem folks have with this discourse is that people end up conflating generalized trauma and the different ways people internalize and externalize said trauma with what ptsd actually is.
the assertion that maedhros can’t have ptsd bc he’s resilient and seemed to have recovered, and the assertion that because maedhros has to be meek and fragile bc he has ptsd is so staggering bc ‘resilient and recovered’ is actually what ptsd looks like a lot of the time. it seems that a lot of us haven’t updated our understanding of ptsd since it was referred to as ‘shell shock’. imo, there’s not really a lack of clarity on how, exactly and canonically, maedhros coped with his trauma. fingon came and got him, and maedhros got up, brushed it off, compartmentalized it, and moved on. he never curled up in the fetal position and cried. he healed his body, then got up and moved on. this isn’t a misrepresentation (on jrrt’s part) of what a trauma victim should look like, nor is it indicative that maedhros didn’t experience ptsd. thats actually really common for a huge majority of ptsd sufferers, and jrrt would know- he had it, and that’s what jrrt himself did. after the war, tolkien hit the ground running. he got married, had kids, he became staff at oxford, became a well renowned scholar; he published four of the highest selling pieces of literature in human history, more or less invented the concept of conlangs, and generated a vast mythos that seems impossible to attribute to one man - seemingly unaffected by the war. i’m not trying to tell you this is exactly what ptsd looks like on everyone, but that this isn’t uncommon, and there’s a high likelihood that the way jrrt wrote maedhros and the way he coped with trauma wasn’t thoughtless.
maedhros had ptsd. any human (elf. person.) who goes through something like that develops ptsd, and different people deal with it in different ways. tldr; you don’t need to change maedhros’ canon characterization to accomodate representation of his ptsd, and maedhros’ canon characterization isn’t a testament to a lack of ptsd. thank you for your time.
