MEME: Do my characters get fucked up in canon? I mean. It's not called Hugbox Creed or Plushie Age...

Altaïr lives longer than he ever should have after an immeasurable amount of trauma, both mental and physical. Alistair... Now I do headcanon him as having a significant injury following DAO, but that's just my headcanon. He still has his measure of difficulty.

And Asaanelain just... He saw the entire world change and his entire world end, so yes.

Edgeworth. Bless him. He lives with trauma and has some very specific phobias because of it.

Edgeworth and Alistair need hot coco. Probably Altair and Asaanelain too, but I'm not canon familiar.

Oh, they both have long stories attached and I'll tell them at work tomorrow

Altaïr's mother died in childbirth and he was raised by the Assassin Brotherhood to be emotionally distant because attachments were seen as detriments to the duty of assassinating those they were assigned to. At the age of 11, though, he saw his father volunteer and be executed after a botched mission to Salah Ad-Din's camp - which wasn't even his fault.

After that, he saw the man whose fault it was come into his room in the middle of the night and slit his own throat after admitting his guilt and saying he was sorry. He was then assigned to that man's son as an adoptive brother and told to keep the secret of his father's actual fate.

He couldn't do it. He had too much compassion, but the boy took it ill and tried to kill him the next day - and succeeded in harming him seriously. And his answer for that? He was put into the dungeons for breaking orders. At 12.

This started a lifelong rivalry between him and that boy, and he closed himself off from everything but duty. Once he was an adult, however, he got sent to retrieve an artifact known as the Chalice. What he found out along the way is that the Chalice was actually a woman named Adha - and they fell in love. He was going to leave the Brotherhood for her.

But then she was kidnapped by Templars and killed on a ship, which he had swam to try to reach. For days. This is where the first game picks up. Altaïr, bitter and heartbroken and arrogant in his skills, kills an innocent man and then faces off with Robert de Sable - which ends with him getting thrown through a wall and getting one man killed.

He is broken down in rank to novice, and also stabbed in the gut - or at least thinks so - by his master. He works his way back up the ranks only to find that said master is actually one of the enemies. He kills his master in the end, but when he burns the body to try to make sure he's dead, he's accused of heresy.

He still takes over as mentor of the brotherhood. Marries a woman who was once a Templar, in fact. But eventually he leaves with his eldest son to try to stop the Mongol army. As he's gone, his old nemesis rises up, kills his son, imprisons his best friend, and when Altaïr returns, kills his wife as well.

Altaïr then spends the next twenty years staring into possible futures and pasts shown to him by a precursor artifact. He does eventually return, kill his nemesis, but he's in his 70s by that point, and he sees his entire way of life end in the encroachment of the new wave of Mongol forces.

So yes, he is a ball of trauma.

Asaanelain... He was born on Kalimdor back when Azeroth had only Kalimdor as a continent. He was a mage and an instructor at the Nar'Thalas academy. And then Azeroth was attacked by the demonic army of the Burning Legion. He ran to try to save his wife and his son.

He pushed his wife out of the way of a demon's blade - but accidentally pushed her into the path of a falling infernal meteor. She and his son were both killed. How he got away from that, he wasn't sure - but their queen, Azshara, had made a deal with the demonic forces. In the process of doing so, Kalimdor fractured. The world literally ended.

He came to in Hyjal, where all arcane magics were now looked down on. It was the last connection he had to the world and he spent the next few thousand years in something of a fugue state until the Legion attacked once more. That was when he decided to join Illidan Stormrage to fight the Legion.

He trained and became a Demon Hunter, taking in demonic energy - attacking the demons with their own power. On one of his earliest missions, he stepped between his own soldiers and an attacking force and was taken captive. They used his newly-grown wings to try to torture him for information. He didn't break and he was rescued, but his wings never healed.

So he has severe PTSD, some very real dissociation, and some amazing physical changes thanks to both injury and demonic energy.