If they had access to any modern diagnostic tools and criteria, who in GITT would have a Definite Diagnosis that informs how you write them?
It would be shorter to list the important characters who do not have CPTSD. This is “the adults fucked me up when I was eight, The Series”
There’s also several who’d walk out with a dissociative personality disorder diagnosis, but there’s an important wrinkle to this. The predominant psychiatric assumption is that all multiplicity is caused by traumatic disruption (abuse, long-term fear, intense medical emergency) to a developing young brain. However, there are plenty of people who say “our childhood was fine, we were just born that way” or “we consciously decided to split on purpose and it worked.” The characters in question (by character I mean “other people perceive them as a unity” but really more two or three characters each) were in fact all born that way — though some were, additionally, traumatized in a way that can affect them strongly. A reader was surprised when I showed them a list of canonically plural characters because two! of them have already rather pointedly “gotten rid of” their “weak side” before they’re introduced. (Spoilers: that never works, long term.)
(Full disclosure for anyone unaware — I have a DID diagnosis in real life. I don’t use “we” pronouns. None of this is meant to be a commentary on how it “does” or “should” work for everyone in real life, where you are a lot less likely to suddenly gain control over the abstract concept of magnetism or something)
Read Glory in the Thunder, with only the most authentic gay teen trauma
