For this rant, I will not go into the reasons why romanticizing trauma through fictional writing is just very harmful because there are other people who have done so already. 

Instead, I will just talk about the issues specific to the applyfic community, mainly writing OC backgrounds that are just inappropriate or just too over-the-top traumatic. I think that both writers and applicants should not shy away from serious topics like abuse, s*xual assault, violence, mental health, or death; but there are times where people just take it way too far. 

I have read applications where the OC has almost every horrible thing possible happen to them but it is explained in a way that lacks any tact or nuance. While it may be possible for a person to experience multiple traumatic things in real life, you are writing an OC for an applyfic. You can only include a certain amount of trauma in your OC’s life before you have unknowingly defined them solely by that trauma. When all these traumatic things are included in the background section, usually in explicit and gorey detail, it is just hard for any readers to follow what the main point of the OC that the application writer is trying to convey. So then the most shocking part becomes the main focus of the application. The reader will not remember your OC’s personality or the ideas that they represent thematically within the applyfic. They will just mostly remember the OC’s extremely dramatic sob story that can be potentially very triggering. Also, too often these come without any content or trigger warnings, which should be the first thing that gets written if the applicant wants to explore these sensitive topics in their application.

I have also read applications where the traumatic background is not that complicated but is still just very inappropriate to the tone and genre of the applyfic. For example, applying to a slice-of-life or comedy fic with an OC who was physically or s*xually abused or had a murdered relative would just not be a good look. You just cannot include such violent and triggering content in your application when the applyfic is supposed to be a funny or healing type of story. 

Even for dark stories, there are just some topics that should not be used because it would be both inappropriate and unbelievable. For example, take cannibalism. Unless the applyfic author is writing a horror story like Hannibal, submitting an OC associated with cannibals to a story about dark korean celebrity scandals would just be too much. The idea of people eating other people is very traumatic for any person to read regardless of what has happened in their lives. At the same time, it is just such a rare yet extremely violent phenomenon, so including it into an OC’s background would just come off as tasteless shock value that makes no sense. Why not focus on something more culturally relevant and grounded in reality like religious cults in South Korea? That is just as terrifying but not as ridiculously or overtly violent.

So basically, similar to racebending, these badly written traumatic backgrounds just do not make your OC anymore interesting or special. Instead, it makes them just convoluted and tiresome to read.