PTSD & Weakness in Fiction

I was diagnosed with PTSD back in 2018. It’s given me a perspective on the subject that I want to share in light of how others have received traumatized characters in stories.

In dealing with my PTSD, I’ve had to become a lot tougher. This aspect of my story is flattering, echoing the truism - that’s been said so many times in so many ways - that courage is not the absence of fear but learning to overcome it.

It’s also not the whole story. It doesn’t mention that in learning to deal with my PTSD episodes I’ve had a lot of moments where the fear won, at least for a time.

I’ve hid in the bathroom of my workplace because some part of my brain somehow believed my abusive ex, who I had blocked everywhere and am several states removed from, was going to find me and hurt me again. I’ve gotten into entirely-avoidable conflicts because a part of my brain thought a conversation happening in the present was linked to a completely unrelated argument from the past and that I was in imminent danger of being hurt again.

This is what I’ve come to refer to as the “stupid” part of having PTSD, where my brain has very stupid notions of what’s going on in the world and what’s about to happen to me. It’s deeply-unflattering, but the stupidity of my PTSD is not to be underestimated in how much worse it can make my life.

But it’s that part of having PTSD that can make depicting it difficult, as it isn’t based in logic and makes a person act unlike themself - basically a death sentence in what has become of online criticism nowadays.

Even if “triggered” hadn’t become a meme, the way that media is criticized on the internet in the modern day might as well be designed not to understand or appreciate any depiction of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that doesn’t leave a character with their dignity 100% in-tact. If it makes a character “look bad” or “weak,” it’s unacceptable.

This vector of critique can be found all across the internet, there’s no “actually, everyone who says this is secretly a fascist” reveal here, and it doesn’t make zero sense. If you like a character, you want them to have a good showing in whatever they appear in. Where this falls apart is how limiting that is.

For example, in the video game Sonic Forces, Tails has a moment of helplessness when he gets ambushed suddenly by what we later learn is a phantom clone of Chaos.

For those who’ve played Chaos’s debut game of Sonic Adventure, they may remember Tails facing Chaos without cowering at all. Indeed, Tails has faced numerous dangerous situations with courage and strength. So why should this moment be any different?

At this point in the story, as far as we’ve seen, Tails’s last taste of action was watching his best friend get (seemingly) killed. Now he sees an ancient god flanking him, after he stepped away from having an active role in combat and shifted toward a reliance on technology since about 2001, and it scares him.

There’s actually a similar scene in the retrospectively-beloved game Sonic Unleashed, where Tails hides from an overwhelming number of Dark Gaia creatures only for Sonic to come to his rescue just as he does in Sonic Forces. One might argue that facing an unknown quantity and many of it ought to logically be scarier to Tails than a foe he’s already fought, but that misses the big picture - he doesn’t fight like that anymore, and he watched Sonic die.

Trauma can change you. Things that never used to set you off can derail an afternoon like nothing. And it’s worth pointing out that, in Sonic Forces, we watch Tails steadily recover and even join in on fighting back against the forces of evil. Sometimes you just need time.

But what if we don’t want that? What if we don’t want a story where Tails is traumatized, where Tails has a moment of helplessness in the face of danger? That brings us to his next appearance - Sonic Frontiers.

In Sonic Frontiers, Tails doesn’t really do anything. He doesn’t fight, he doesn’t cower, his role in the story seems to be devoted to expositing lore and placating fans who were mystified by the ‘inconsistency’ in his character. The ‘answer’ provided for why he could be so helpless when he was so brave before is, in case you were wondering, that he’s still growing up.

This ‘fix’ (for a moment that didn’t need fixing) gets ‘lampshaded’ by a later scene in the DLC for the game, with Knuckles remarking that everyone needs help sometimes regardless of how old they are - including Sonic, which is made further obvious by the fact that both Tails & Knuckles are helping Sonic in that moment. Which effectively nullifies everything they tried to do with Tails in the base game’s story.

But that’s what happens when you try to run away from the simple fact of human vulnerability, or try to make up some excuse to tell yourself that one day you’ll never be helpless or afraid ever again. Neither of those things need an excuse, they just happen.

So let’s not run away. Some things need to be faced, even when we’re afraid to, even when it’s gone badly before and we’re afraid it’ll go badly again.

Let’s talk about that scene in Metroid: Other M again.

A lot has already been said, I know. A lot of people are sick of discussing it, sick of arguing over it, sick of even thinking about the game. The internet is good at putting people in that state. I’d probably save myself a lot of headache if I never spoke of the game ever again.

There’s just one thing, though: in all the thousands of words that’ve been written and said about Other M, positive and negative, I have never heard anyone articulate their feelings on that scene as both a feminist and a person suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Somehow, for a game depicting a PTSD episode that got derided as sexist toward its protagonist, it’s never come up as far as I’ve seen.

So I’m gonna fix that.

This post is being written with the assumption that everyone reading it already knows about one of the most infamous scenes of the most infamous entry in a culturally-significant video game series. If I sound like I’m recapping the scene, it’s only to highlight aspects of it that’re significant for this discussion.

Samus encounters Ridley, for the first time since she thought she killed him. She gasps and freaks out. The game pans over the scene, turning Samus briefly into a little girl, before having her get scooped up into his clutches and dragged through the air only to be rescued as a friend arrives barely in the nick of time. All of these things caused an uproar among players, who were appalled at how weak Samus acted in the scene.

Unlike with the previous example of Tails, Samus has fought Ridley numerous times at this point and is a well-seasoned combatant even if you’re not imagining a timeline in which Samus visits a Smash Mansion to compete in Super Smash tournaments in between Metroid games. She didn’t recently experience loss like Tails had, she didn’t break down in any of the previous times she faced Ridley, so what the hell is going on here?!

Trauma. It’s trauma again.

But why? She’s beaten him multiple times before, it makes no sense for her to be scared of him now, right? What about what’s logical for the character?

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder doesn’t care about logic, doesn’t care about making sense, and doesn’t care how strong you’ve been before. If you’re caught by it at the wrong time, you will be that same little girl who lost both her parents to a monster in the blink of an eye.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, when I first saw the scene. There was no self-consciousness, no apologies, just one huge punch to the gut that doesn’t hold anything back. We see Ridley like we’ve never seen him before as we view him through Samus’s eyes, the glow of those haunting yellow eyes reflecting the terror that Samus feels in the deepest corners of her heart.

Her friends try to reach her, but the fear is suffocating. He snatches her in his clutches, looming menacingly over her while giving us a sense of the scale of this monster, and the armor we met her in… begins to fade away against her will.

She slams her fist down to try to stop it, to stop the spiral and wrench herself out of the PTSD episode she’s plummeting into, but she’s only just able to get her armor back in time to survive a fall that may have killed her otherwise.

It’s when she seems to be about to lose someone again, after the monster attacks a friend who was there for her when she needed him most, that Samus finds that strength we’ve all seen her have before. She faces the monster once more as it roars, but this time she’s ready to fight.

If I had to criticize anything about this scene, it’d be the fact that Samus pushes past the episode so quickly. That is not remotely the experience I’ve had when I’ve been triggered… but, frankly, it’s a story in a video game that would’ve been a lot worse had Samus been totally immobilized by fear before being brutally murdered by Ridley.

Even with the pacing and structure of a video game prohibiting this PTSD episode from being 100% true-to-life from my experience, I consider it a masterpiece. I’ve never looked at Samus the same way since I played the game, and it’s not just for knowing she can be weak - it’s that she can feel powerless, helpless, and overcome it. When I think of that, I think maybe I can overcome it all too.

Unlike in the previous example with Tails, Samus’s next appearance doesn’t backpedal into nothingness. The outrage at Other M was clearly heard by those who developed Metroid Dread and further controversy was safely avoided for reasons I am entirely sympathetic to, but it still managed to do something with Samus’s character that was worth a damn all the same. For that, I’m grateful.

Still, it disappoints me that we’re probably not going to see another game quite like Other M. Even after the dust has settled, and people have stopped being weirdly obsessive about Sakamoto-san and his statements about Samus since he worked on a Metroid game they liked, it’s not likely we’ll be seeing Samus show as much vulnerability as she did in Other M again.

Wanna know why the movies that make you laugh end up making you cry harder than movies that don’t? Or why cartoons that were too afraid to let you feel sad never meant as much to you growing up as the ones that weren’t scared of tugging at your heartstrings?

It all comes down to emotional contrast.

Emotional contrast is a part of life. No one goes through life feeling one emotion and nothing more, no matter how much Batman fanboys want to pretend otherwise - there are times where we laugh, times where we cry, and days where we do both. It’s by depicting this contrast that stories are able to tap into something deep within our hearts, something fundamental and real, that draws these emotions out.

Watching Samus get put through the ringer in-game is one thing, but when she gets affected so strongly by something that happens in the story? After everything I’ve watched her go through? That affects me too, and makes what follows after more meaningful to me than if she started shooting Ridley immediately without any drama.

On a more personal level, seeing Samus or Tails go through PTSD episodes like I have and coming out the other side of them means a lot to me. It may not be flattering, but I am not sorry that there’s weakness inside of me or that sometimes it gets to me. I have been triggered in the past and I likely will be triggered again. Samus did falter and almost perish at the hands of her parent’s killer, after years of overcoming the odds before then.

But that wasn’t the end of her story, and it’s not the end of mine either.