PTSD and Panic in Entertainment, Part 1

Spoiler Warning: This article will contain spoilers for Episode 8 of Fun City

I’d also like to preface this by saying that I am by no means an expert in any sense when it comes to PTSD and Psychological Trauma. Regardless of my own interactions with these forms of experience, I have not done extensive research into the matter, and everything I will be talking about involves a surface level understanding of these issues after some brief searches through medical websites, and personal anecdotes.

Actual Play podcasts tend to be silly, fun places for people to get their RPG fix. Sometimes they deal with difficult subject matter, but if they do it’s wrapped up in metaphor and innuendo so much that they rarely make much of an impact. We don’t often see these concepts dealt with in raw, unrestrained clarity. With that in mind, let’s talk about Episode 8 of Fun City.

During the events of the episode, the players find the ‘main antagonist’ of the adventure and convince him to let them scan him. The man, a Troll named Solix, is an intimidatingly large individual, nine feet tall and powerfully built. After a briefly tense moment in which this man discovers their ruse, a riot breaks out in a nearby room. The moment that this riot breaks out Solix cowers, making himself as small as possible. He’s shaking, terrified, whimpering as he repeatedly presses a small red button on his wristwatch. Even as his guards come to help him leave, he seems like he can’t act. His guards have to struggle to carry him out of the building as he just… can’t.

This entire scene plays out in a way that many people suffering from mental illness may recognize. A reaction caused by the illness happens in a crisis situation, the people around you react immediately to the crisis situation and fail to act on what would normally be clear symptoms and instability, and you’re just left alone and isolated as you do whatever you can to alleviate your situation. For some of us that can be something as simple as retreating inward, and for others it can be the instinctual need to make yourself as small as possible.

Based on how specific the reaction in this scene was, it’s safe to say that this was a deliberate attempt on the part of the creators to accurately and respectfully portray PTSD, and that’s commendable. This may not have been one of the main cast, but this character was established just moments before as a credible threat to the lives of everyone present. By choosing this character as the vector to explore this experience, they managed to portray PTSD in an unambiguous way without pulling any punches or playing the character off as a joke. Hopefully they manage to have the players interact with this character again without mocking him for his trauma, which I’m confident this cast will do. The only thing I wish they had done differently was to place a content warning at the beginning for PTSD, as that was a particularly shocking moment to stumble into blindly.

I’ve got some things to say about a scene that happens immediately after involving the character Viv and Sensory Overload, but I’m still figuring out how I want to relay my opinion on that, so I’ll talk about that… I dunno, probably next week.

If this interests you, the episode in question can be found at https://open.spotify.com/episode/2eTAJsud8UhelR4c0tmu1G?si=MvFYx9p1S1i6nGjLsxqp3A