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I suspect most of you who would be interested in this already read

rachelmanija, but just in case you don't, she's posted Part I of a 3-part series she's written on post-traumatic stress disorder. If you're writing a character with PTSD, struggling with it yourself, or just interested in knowing more, head on over.

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A fascinating post. It made me think about PTSD in anime, and I'm thinking about writing an essay analyzing various characters. Right now I have Fai Flowright, Kenshin Himura and Spike Spiegel on the list.

That would be interesting. I'll look forward to reading it (and see if I can think of any more characters XD).

I'm looking forward to rewatching Rurouni Kenshin and Cowboy Bebop. Kenshin's tendency to slip back into Battousai mode, and Spike's one eye on the past (which is Fai too) both seem reflective of PTSD.

I would also nominate Roy Mustang, Hakkai, and ~~the entire cast of~~ Heero and Wu Fei from Gundam Wing. A number of characters in X/1999 display briefer PTSD-like reactions.

Mustang occurred to me too, once I had the first list. And really, the entire main cast of Saiyuki qualifies. I think I'll add Rikuo and Kazahaya from Legal Drug, Revy from Black Lagoon, Jin from Samurai Champloo and even Yuki from Fruits Basket. You're right about Gundam Wing too.

I thought about Furuba (and Jin) too, but couldn't recall if what they displayed was actually PTSD, or some different sort of post-trauma reaction. Jin only sleeping sitting up is pretty classic, though.

Kenshin sleeps sitting up as well: I couldn't tell if this was a Samurai Thing or a Kenshin Thing.

I've been trying to remember what the female protagonist in MARS was like and if PTSD might be a factor with her, but it's been so long since I read MARS, I can't remember much of anything about it.

So does Inu-Yasha. It seems to be a samurai thing that swordsmen were trained in. Notice sometime the position of the sword when they're sleeping like that. It's braced between their legs with the hilt at the left shoulder. There's a scene in the Kenshin ova when Tomoe gets too close to him when he's sleeping like that and he draws on her.

There's probably a paper somewhere in that - I remember reading somewhere, maybe in the book on sleep I read a while back, that it's next to impossible to get a good night's sleep while sitting up. So you'd get people trained in martial arts who were cranky, hair-triggery, and not thinking right from sleep deprivation. No wonder you get these stories about samurai striking off peasants' heads for accidentally touching them or whatnot.

I was thinking about that the other day, when I was looking at one of those scenes where the Saiyuki guys are all sleeping sitting up in Jeep (supposedly - actually, Gojyo and Hakkai turn out to be awake "because the stars are too bright").

No wonder they're all such homicidal maniacs.

(Kyo, too ... ! Whereas Yukimura not only lies down - he changes into a yukata, if we can believe Benitora's memories when Taihaku almost kills him!)

One of the striking things about Jin is how closed off he is for much of the first part of the series. That one episode in which they're caught at the checkpoint and Jin and Fuu have to wait for Mugen to get back has Fuu trying to talk to Jin and never getting anything more from him for hours than a "hmmm". And with the martial artists (like Jin) that hypervigilance is pretty classic as well.

With Yuki, I'm thinking of how much he dwells on his childhood being controlled by Akito and how little he believes he deserves the adulation of his classmates. It's such a significant step for him when he agrees to be student council president. Rin is another who seems to have PTSD.

I memoried it to my honey do list. Der. Most of the cast of Saiyuki display symptoms of PTSD, so knowing more about it is useful to me too.

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