Thorn: Okay, sorry! Didn’t mean to pry. But just so you know, I wouldn’t judge.
How could I, right? I’m here because, the other day, I had this flashback and pulled a heartsword on a room full of civilians. Thought I was doing better than that, y’know?
Kale: I murdered a bunch of people.
Thorn: Are you messing with me?
Kale: Oh, no. This was serious. Blood and guts all over the place.
Thorn: Okay, okay, I’ll stop bothering you.
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It’s always bugged me how in a bunch of like, fanfiction and stuff, everyone is just prone to telling each other their backstories no matter what the situation, so I always appreciate it when characters avoid doing that, be it because “we are literally strangers WHO ARE YOU WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MY BACKSTORY” or more along the lines of “I don’t believe for five seconds that anyone would believe a word out of my mouth if I told you the thing”.
So yeah, thanks for this. Not that I’d mind if this were a sarcastic confession, because those are great too.
Mmyep. Thorn is in full “guilty confessional oversharing” mode, but it’s gonna be a couple more storylines (and maybe a crisis or two) before Kale feels like sharing anything seriously.
Now I feel bad because I TOTALLY do this in my stories LOL. I didn’t think anyone noticed.
Meantime, I have to twist my characters’ arms into telling each other their names if circumstances haven’t forced it.
It sometimes depends on the character as well as the circumstance. If you have a group that’s been made to work together and they need a reason to trust each other or to trust each other’s skills, dropping some backstory can be a good idea, so long as it’s relevant.
“Why should I trust you to be a good spy?”
“I spent the last twenty years taking down sex traffickers. Why should I trust you to be a good mage?”
“I have enough potential to explode people by accident.”
*snicker*
Looks like someone’s waaaay overdue for talking therapeutically with someone who’s been in his shoes. There isn’t some kinda trauma support group? He never talks to the other members of his team about this?
There’s a lot of trauma support! And Thorn was doing it pretty heavily post-dragon.
It’s not like he’s been repressing everything and this is the first time it came out. The flashback would’ve been much worse, and left him much less functional, if he didn’t already have grounding techniques and coping mechanisms going in.
Worst case scenario: he’s completely honest.
Hey, at least he’s in therapy for it.
Haha, so the Kevin reference runs deeper than I thought. Nice detail 😀
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