How do you write believably dialogue for a character that has undergone a significant trauma that you yourself have not experienced?
At the very least, I'd like to avoid being ridiculously offensive if I try writing, for example, someone who was molested as a child, both because it would make for a better story and because I don't want to romanticize the experience on the off-chance someone at the table was molested.
I was thinking of reading a biography of someone who had undergone something of that stripe, what else would be helpful?
That might be a better place to ask this. Alright, my bad.
Cameron Richardson
This comic is seriously fuqqqed up.
Blake Long
The behavior of the average adventurer is consistent with a big basket of personality disorders
Normal people with healthy brains who nothing bad happened to as children don't leave home and wander into dungeons to cash in on the governor's bounty on goblin prostates
Different people take different experiences in different ways. There is no "right" way to have a character portray the trauma they experienced, so it depends on how much you'd want them to be affected at the time of the conversation. Are the nonchalant about it and just accept those hard times as a vital piece of their past that made them the way they are now? Have they been rejecting the memories and are experiencing the emotions they've been smothering this whole time? How does the conversation come to such a personal point at all in the plot? Be empathetic, try to fit yourselves in the character's shoes despite not quite knowing what it means. In general, the key to making that character's plights believable-- no matter what their perspective-- is if the party can still relate in some way. Don't put emphasis on the molestation, put emphasis on the betrayal.
Jason Jones
Watch movies and comics of such events.
Tell us what insights you gained.
Jonathan Turner
Just youtube interviews with people who's been through shit. Watch ones that are related to what you're interested in portraying, take the parts you think are effective at conveying the emotional impact.
tl;dr just do 15 seconds of research in google.
Nathaniel Gomez
>not channeling your own fucked up life into characters so your own traumas manifest in them
casual
William Bell
Guys, OP clearly wants to talk about Clarissa, stop pretending otherwise.
Isaiah Miller
Source?
Charles Ortiz
I generally use my own trauma as a baseline and work my way from there.
Jason Jones
Little Bitch Planet
Samuel Garcia
Listen to Komm Susser Tod a thousand times strike and inspiration will arrive.
Juan Morales
He asked for a source of that porn, not where you're from
Gavin Walker
Does one lead to the other?
Cameron Howard
Kek. Funi funi
Nathaniel Rodriguez
I think its alright to avoid going out of your way to be shocking or offensive but you take it to the point where you are tiptoeing around the subject to avoid offending someone, that never works, there are people who get triggered by certaing stuff even if you try to be subtle about it, they dont even need to be victims to get upset
basically, it depends more on the type of person you are playing with more than the stuff they have experienced
if you play with compulsive virtue signalers or judgemental normies you are going to have a bad time sooner or later
Gavin Roberts
Think about how a horrific experience that results in PTSD might lead to someone concluding that nothing has meaning. If, let's say, your teacher or coach abused you when you were young, and you never got justice for any number of reasons, imagine how you would feel the God or karma or anything never intervened. If the Universe just kept on turning, and no one stopped to so much as wipe your tears and offer a hand.
Brody Lopez
Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species’ obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparking Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by “human suffering,” the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But those are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s “Last Messiah.” It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgap world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.
Kevin Russell
Read case studies and psychological research into what the psychology of someone who has gone through that kind of trauma is like. Scholarly articles are your friend here. TL:DR Research!
