#tos:a

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Town of Salem: Anticipation and ableism

Note: Please don’t harass anyone in this thread or go to the Discord to spread hate. Thanks. Also, there’ll be misinformation of DID in this thread (spread by the Discord) as well as some other ableist shit, so be warned.

The Town of Salem: Anticipation server is a Discord equivalent of Town of Salem, a web/Steam/mobile game that was pretty popular in the mid-2010s. The basic goal of the game is that you have many roles/factions that you can be put into, and you have to satisfy that goal’s win conditions/goals. For example, Mafia must kill/lynch anybody who opposes their team, like Town or Neutrals (like Serial Killers). Survivors must survive until the end of the game. The Discord server adds their own modifiers and roles to make it more special, and one of its game modifiers is... very telling.

The game modifier in question is called Dissociative Identity Disorder.

The normal “All Any” mode is one where you can have any role from any faction (and thus win condition), but the DID modifier makes it so that you can share a “body” with another player who has a different faction/win condition.

A few people (systems) I’ve talked to about this mode agree it’s fun, but the titling isn’t so great. Not to mention, other references to DID aren’t so great in this server, and refer to it as a “curse” or a “blessing”.

Which isn’t so great. There’s a few examples of misinformation in the Discord as well about DID (and other trauma-based disorders), for example:

For those who don’t know; DID is formed when you suffer repeated trauma during the formative years of the brain (childhood, basically). The ages vary around 11 or so. MPD is an old term for DID that was changed in 1994 to reflect the reality of the condition, where DID is more like fragments of a singular personality rather than multiple people in one body, so to think that DID=MPD nowadays just goes to show how much people in this Discord don’t care about these serious mental conditions.

There was also a gif of “Split” (the M. Night Shyamalan movie) shared when this game modifier is brought up, which is a horrible depiction of DID because, you know, the antagonist quite literally becomes a monster. The system community absolutely loathes it when this movie is brought up because it’s one of the most popular horror movies that depicts a character with DID. We rarely get positive representation in the media, so for something as horrifying as Split being the most recognizable piece of media featuring a character with DID is awful for us.

To harp on the game modifier some more: The point of DID is to survive. The brain creates “other people” (or identities) as a defense mechanism to keep itself alive, so to think that the game mode is also “all any”, where anyone can have different roles/win conditions, doesn’t make sense. While the brain may create self-sabotaging identities, that is rare, and even those that do harm its body/systemmates directly usually mean it with the best of intentions (for example, self-harming so that the body doesn’t look pretty to its abusers).

I’m not against a game modifier like this existing. From all accounts of everyone (again, systems) I’ve talked to, they think the game mode sounds cool. But holy shit do they need to change the name. “Curses” and “blessings” are not what you should describe a trauma disorder. There is no spiritual connection to DID and there never will be, because it’s a trauma-based disorder. To think that having so much childhood trauma that you can’t undergo stress without splitting and creating more identities is a “blessing” needs to go get themselves checked. It’s horrible; you lose memories, you can’t exactly keep track of who you are, and you can get swept into a reality so delusional you lose people you care about along the way.

I’m sure there’s more ableism in the Discord, but I don’t really want to go sweeping through that mess. DID is a game modifier with really weird, really wrong implications.

[captainsbabysitter-blog]

Hm... How up for me liveblogging the entirety of TOS, TOS:AS, and the TOS movies would everyone be? Because I’m craving some Star Trek and I have no homework to tell me not to.