epi and cyma

<OJ> One of the more productive analyses you can do of Replay Value is interpreting it in terms of trauma.
<OJ> There's at /least/ two layers here - the trauma of the characters and the trauma of the players as expressed through characters - though I hope you understand if, for now, I restrict you to the first layer.
<OJ> At least one definition of traumatic experience is that it is a break from past patterns so dramatic that you feel that you can no longer use the past to predict the future.
<OJ> There are more, and I will leave you to searching for them yourself on your own time (because some of them are more relevant than others and I will just tell you right now that the DSM and ICD definitions are really not useful at all), but this is the simplest place to start.
<OJ> I really need to get to finishing my Chart of Coercion-based analysis of Sburb
<OJ> The gist of it is that what Sburb attempts to do is use small amounts of trauma to shape your behavior to the ideal of an X of Y.
<OJ> With the threat of bigger amounts of trauma if you /don't/.
<OJ> And once you've experienced your world torn apart once, it's difficult not to be tempted just to fall into line, so that you at least have half an idea what tomorrow is going to look like.
<OJ> So this is the world I write Replay Value in.
<OJ> Sburb, through whatever mechanism, has become a brainwashing system.
<OJ> An accidentally effective one.
<OJ> (My pet theory is evolutionary design with several "normal" games as input, which would account for the many, many rough edges, but you don't have to care about what that means or whether it's right.)
<OJ> So, the longer you play, the more and more likely you are to encounter something that will break you, whether because you haven't been /quite/ enough of an X of Y or because the Game is just being... well, glitchy.
<OJ> There are many, many ways to break someone's mind.
<OJ> One of them - which is immediately relevant - is forcing them to choose an action where there are no good choices or no good information on the choices, so that they are forced to take responsibility for what happens as a result.
<OJ> Regardless of whether they /intended/ for the results they ended up causing.
<OJ> Do you begin to see where I am leading you?
<tenebrousPsycher> I think I do, yes.
<OJ> To Epi, the mere /prospect/ of having his world turned upside-down by taking responsibility for a choice made with damn near zero information, that may not ever have /been/ a choice at all (cf. Endless Climb), is so terrifying that he can no longer think about /not/ playing his Role.
<OJ> For Sburb veterans, this is on the /low/ end of trauma.
<OJ> Epi does not have any major disturbances to his sense of self or his ability to have productive social relationships.
<OJ> He is still able to stand up for himself and others and have enough self-awareness to pull himself out of low points before they spiral into darkness.
<OJ> He is not pathologically dependent upon any one person for his very sanity and sense of safety. He does not attempt to force other people into sitting through his trauma so that they take him seriously.
<OJ> These are behaviors you see in other Replayers of high session count who do not have a handle on their trauma.
<OJ> And even so, his relative sanity is because of the gift, the gift that so far seems not to have strings attached (but they may become visible at a later date...) of seven years in the Ring as Heart so that he could work out his own problems.
<OJ> No quests. No demands on his time. No Game trying to kill him to force him to improve every day. /None/ of that. It's everything Myra wanted and never got, and because she could've been saved if she /did/, he was equipped to take full advantage of it as fast as possible.
<OJ> So Epi, in being a Replayer that does not show cracks every time he moves, is already an anomaly.
<OJ> Zeimah is /young/. Her Cataclysm Session roll of Seer of Law, the one she voyaged as, was her /third/ /session/.
<OJ> Though she has played enough Time to get a good, long look at exactly how brutal the Game can be, and enough Law to stare it in the face unblinkingly and wait for Death to blink first, she has /not/ had an experience that fundamentally shakes her sense of self and what she is capable of.
<OJ> Until now, that is.
<OJ> Epi loves her, you see, in a protective older sibling way, in a way that - for the first year, two years, three years - he keeps wondering when she's going to /change/, when she's going to stop trusting him, when she's going to misinterpret something and blow up and then refuse to make it up to him ever again.
<OJ> It becomes clear she really does, legitimately and fully and genuinely, trust him in a way that he can no longer remember being possible.
<OJ> Because she has never been methodically disassembled and flushed down the toilet piece by piece, for her to reassemble or not-reassemble herself on the other side.
<OJ> She has never had to question her most basic assumptions about who she is and why she does what she does and whether choices are ever really free when made under a continuous pressure of "improve or die".
<OJ> Epi's relationship with Myra was tested, and was never quite the same again, when fourteen broke him along the same lines as Myra's own trauma, for a while, and they could not talk of it to each other.
<OJ> Self-hatred, self-hatred because of one's own /choices/, is a matter intimately familiar to Kim Su-Cheol, and for all that he understands it exists and he cannot get away from it, he nevertheless wishes that it had never happened to him, that he would be /able/ to stare at a decision-node again without the eternal lurching feeling that he is merely choosing between Scylla and Charybdis.
<OJ> He knows, intellectually, that they live inside the Game and he /cannot/ spare Zeimah this realization, the Game's "you know, it would be a real shame if..." at the door the first night you move into the Mafia neighborhood, but he didn't think it would be so /soon/.
<OJ> He'd hoped she could experience true competence without the years of soul-searching and shame and guilt and self-doubt that seem to accompany it in everyone he has ever known.
<OJ> And - and then he /tells/ /her/ that he's ashamed of himself, for how he's treated Mindblogger, for how everyone /else/ in the Seer Network treated her, and that she is probably best placed to make it right.
<OJ> And she goes along with this, knowing that her older brother's sometimes irrationally attached to his ideas of who is blamed for what, and finds herself participating in a ritual of violating Aelfrida Smithson's dignity, removing her damage, and pasting it onto a Carapace that did no wrong to deserve it.
<OJ> He cannot handle being, however obliquely, the cause of his younger sister's fall from grace.
<OJ> It is /this/ that makes him ashamed, that prevents him from being able to critically examine himself, because he's terrified that he will discover that /he/ was the one who destroyed her.
<OJ> And - and no matter if she /can/ understand why he no longer knows trust, anymore. It will never be the same, because she will now also involve herself in this strange dance of attachment and distance, love and fear that love will be used against you.
<OJ> This
<OJ> This is the kind of story I am telling.