The Attachments to Reality

I just got done playing a DnD campaign last night where I played an anti-capitalist, anti-establishment elf who lost his family to human expansion through an accident. Really nerdy shit, but one of the greatest things that role playing games like DnD do for the players is to practice empathy. Obviously I have never lost my family. My family, by far and large, has been pretty privileged in even the worst of times since we are all white, hetero-normative and are afforded luxuries like not having to worry about our housing getting displaced by a highway, or being racially stereotyped, or whatever else.

But there I was, at the end of the campaign we had been playing for months now, turning into he villain and carrying the party with me into that villainy, imagining the things that this character would have been feeling in the moments just before that imaginary ice knife got hurled into a character that was "just doing their job" and being a cog in the wheel of the imaginary Capitalist world that was being painted before us.

By the end of the session, my character made a pretty big redemption in de-escalating the fight that he had started after rounds of resentment and anger driving him into bad choices, but coming to terms with his own slippery slope into villainy.

After the session ended, though, I had quite a long thought experiment of what would happen in this imaginary world. I came up with a whole story that I could have easily turned into a short story, but writing fantasy doesn't appeal to me. Hell, I struggle reading fantasy because of how far detached it is from reality, and how I fell backwards into DnD as a game I now play weekly is just because I enjoy the friends I spend the time with and the mechanics of how the game works makes for some interesting moments. There are a plentiful amount of games I would rather play, though. Even within the fantasy realm, a game like Mork Borg is far more appealing with its nihilistic approach to the world and every game mechanic you can imagine - even the characters are generated at random, and within the rules it even states that you likely won't live long enough for the name of your character to matter. It is all as meaningless as the real world, except this world doesn't end in 7 days so we have to suffer the consequences of everyone else's egos attempting to force everyone else around them into believing they are valuable.

But let me get back on topic. After the end of the session, and everyone had gone home (or those that were staying with me found themselves slumbering in their respective spot in my house), I laid awake contemplating what kind of damage this character would have been encumbered by. I thought about how this character would have imagined himself becoming so close to being a villain. I imaged all the pain and suffering he would carry through his entire life up to that fulcrum point, and how it would have changed but still been carried ever after. The weight of it being carried around for hundreds of years - this is a fantasy world, afterall, and elves live for hundreds of years - being unable to ever working through the trauma, and having to consciously acknowledge that the evil that caused it was the predominant power within this world.

This all makes it sound like I spent a lot more time delved into this imaginary world than what it actually was, but in actuality it was only a five to ten minute span of time where the thought experiment was being thrust into the frame works of a short story that I told myself I would write today once my friends left. Instead, this is what came out.

No matter where my mind took that imaginary character, there was only one logical ending for him that felt fitting. He would go as far as he could away from the world that was causing so much pain and suffering to everyone it touched - whether it be the druids outside the city with their homes being corrupted by the robbery of the life force of the forestry itself, or it be the people within the cities who became cogs in the wheel of productivity and became slaves to a system that was hell bent on using their energies to empower the very few, or it be those who were having their homes destroyed by expansion for the sake of empowering the very few even more. The character in question would have never been able to live a life where they weren't faced with that reality, and so the only logical conclusion to his story would be for him to get as far away from those social constructs as possible and light himself on fire until there was nothing left except the memory of how he nearly became a villain in the eyes of all the cogs of the world that was destroying them.

I read a couple years ago that games like DnD had started being utilized as tools for therapy because of the way it allowed people to explore empathy in a low-risk way. Once the game ends, there is no consequence to the actions of the characters, but that doesn't mean the actions of players don't hold weight. When my character decided to stand across the room of whom he saw being a representative of the very society that ripped his wife and children from him and he threw that imaginary ice knife in her direction, landing a hit and beginning what would be combat with someone who wasn't evil at all, everyone at the table had a very real reaction of "do we continue this murder hobo or do something different entirely, because this doesn't feel right?" Even a few rounds into the combat we still had a couple players at the table who hadn't done a single attack in any direction. Nor should it have. And imagining what my character would have felt when he would see his closest ally not following his actions is what led to him making a different choice ultimately, and de-escalating the fight to seek a more peaceful resolution.

His trauma was his to carry as an individual, as all of our trauma is ours to carry as an individual, and if we don't do what is necessary to deal with our own trauma then we will all, in time, become the villain in someone else's life. Unfortunately, it takes a lot longer to work through trauma than it does to become encumbered by it.

-Dustin S. Stover