Question: Who here has watched weirdmageddon? Go watch it. It’s pretty good. Ok, Setting: STandard urban fantasy masquerade, involving wizard councils, werewolves, vampires, magicians, government agencies, men in black, etc. Backstory: A demon broke out. The bad kind. The really bad kind. Shit happened. The first thing he did, was introduce himself to the whole world via telepathic shout. The rivers turned into blood. Waterfalls fell into the sky. Rain turned black and acidic. Statues came to life with ghastly life, and began to kill anything they could lay their hands on. Zombies arose. And not the slow, dumb kind. Animals grew tentacles and laser eyes and started eating humans. Random inanimate structures came to life and started wrecking havoc. All sorts of monsters, demons, spirits, and ghosts, came out to wreck havoc. World turned to hell. Really bad. Think about it. You’re a normal guy... then your car turns alive, and tries to eat you. The sky turns red. The moon turns into a giant eye, weeping pus and phlegm. The cities burn. You see people die in many horrible ways, from normal diseases, to ghosts, tortured by fae, eaten by monsters, killed by spirits, or crushed to death by the town memorial. You scrounge about the ruins, dodging monsters, eating rats, trash, and cockroaches. Your kid dies from food poisoning. Or because the insulin ran out. All around you, are the corpses of your fellow humans. Or their petrified statues. Or what became of them after they became works of living ‘art’. This state of affairs lasted for 7 months. Then a strike team came up, and took down the demon. And releasing a single McGuffin, taking the energy released when he was banished back to his home dimension. Time is reversed, and everyone who died, everyone who was mutilated, and everyone who was injured, was restored back to peak physical condition. Everything else is restored... at last 90% of it was. There are still regions in the world where the change is still there. Places of altered laws of physics. Some living statues, some still-mutated animals... and far fewer supernatural fauna. Now, the thing here, is this: Everyone in this world, by this time, has gone through one of the most traumatising events in their life. Everything they had and knew in their world, was torn down, destroyed, and wiped out before their very eyes. They pleaded for mercy and compassion, and received none. They saw loved ones die, or receive fates worse than death, and they could do nothing. They starved. They sickened. And the sky was awash with the laughter of thirsting gods. Now suddenly... all of that disappeared. Except for a few exceptions. How to deal with this?
Honestly??? A bullet to the head will be the answer of many. As for the rest... I dunno, a good research of how war veterans dealt with PTSD sounds like a good idea.
If you want to write well, then: 1. Learn about post traumatic disorder. 2. Learn about post traumatic growth - for your protagonist. 3. Read Gulag Archipelago. 4. Read Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand 5. Read books about Holocaust by Leon Uris. 6. Read about Holomodor in Ukraine. 7. Read about Khmer Rouge time Kambodia. 8. Read about Pogroms in eastern Europa. 9. Read about victims of very sick narcism. 10. Organise your reading. 20-40 books and 100 - 300 well selected web pages is a good start. It is of course only a start, a starting block. You can find a lot of good university level psychology lectures from you tube. Via them you can get some understanding about anxiety, stress and disorders to related it, human coping maechanisms... You must start with your personal research. You need to have deep emotional understanding about hope-dispair dichotomy. You must have respect for sorrow. Research and background work is everything. You must be ahead of the level off your writing. But... If you just want to write and don't care about the quality: 1. Ask from those who don't know and then... 2. ...go and write. 3. Try to find few Ignoramuses to betaread your text. They'll tell it's fine.
New world. All that was before no longer exists, what you knew is done and gone. You create your life from the rubble around you but now you are in control and you can decide if you want to be human or something else.
