In the 18th century it became fashionable for people of “sensibility” (ie. sensitivity) to tremble and faint with strong emotions and be overwhelmed super easily, and later artists like Jane Austen loved to mock the shit outta that, but extreme emotional reactivity, especially to the point of trembling and fainting, is often a symptom of complex trauma or chronic stress, so what if these days we gave fainting ladies a bit of a break and realize their lives may not have been perfect.
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Is “your whole body gets paralyzed while watching an episode on the backstory of a character you find extremely relatable” also included in the list?
Yes! This can go from the brief “riveted with interest/frozen in fear” to full-on catatonia for hours or days.
A lot of Early Modern fiction makes sense if you go “All the Super Extra WTF people are traumatized as fuck.” Since Early Modern Europe had some SUPER not-helpful childrearing practices, like farming babies out, that did not promote trauma resilience, and it was also an age where violence, assault, and unexpected death were incredibly pervasive at every walk of life.
Here’s a brief rundown of ordinary symptoms of the traumatic response:
I’m ending the debate once and for all
Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because you can truthfully see that it’s 69° outside and go “nice” rather than immediately collapsing from heat exhaustion
also you can cook and reasonably often set your oven to 420°
Nice.
You can set your oven at 420 and your thermostat at 69 and finish a brisk, energetic boning session with some delightfully crispy brownies.
nail polish is goblincore bc you can make your fingernails colorful and sparkly and also you can hoard the bottles which are colorful and make good clacking sounds
Robes are stupid. My sorcerer dresses like Petyr Baelish.
To expand: if you are a mage, dress like a noble. Do not dress like a wizard. Pointy conical hat and sky-blue robes is medieval semaphore for “kill first and with extreme prejudice.” Tailored black silk over cloth-of-gold and studded with rubies says “Harmless, but valuable; ransom if possible or kill last.”
If you dress like a noble, they’re not going to pay attention as you take a turn or two to back away from the melee and prepare yourself. The ruse is only broken when you reveal yourself, at which point 8d6 fire damage is screaming toward them at Mach Fuck anyway, so no big.
counterpoint: if you don’t get to dress like someone ran a magical thrift shop through a rototiller and frankensteined the pieces back together what’s the god-damned point of being a wizard
The sartorial differences between wizards and sorcerers are on display, I think.
That makes perfect sense, really, since sorcerers don’t generally get a choice about gaining spellcasting abilities and might not want to advertise them 24/7 whereas wizards put a lot of effort into becoming wizards and didn’t spend years in Wizard Grad School just to be low-key about it.
