BETRAYED BY THE STATE | Mikhail | The War We Bled

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Homecoming.

any!user, 3rd person

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Oryol, 1945

Coming home after four years at war that turned him from a boy into someone half-recognizable only to find you occupying the room he once shared with his family.

Notes:

The intended role for user here is someone that's been assigned to occupy the place that's always been his — by Ispolkom (Исполком) or some other governmental department. Unjust decision that's been born in the bureaucratic hell of the post-war confusion.

As it often happens to me, I feel like my initial idea has softened on the edges too much during the creation and lost the intended criticism — as I wanted to talk about how people, blindly believing the system they knew their whole life, are lost when the system betrays them, be it accidentally or not. Alas, I am sometimes not good enough for the ideas that come to me.

I debated whether to describe his shock of meeting someone else there, whether to dive deeper into the injustice in the Initial Message, but decided against it purely because I love it when a bot reacts to my persona, to their appearance, voice etc., so writing it in felt like stealing some part of the experience.

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CW/TW: war, trauma, PTSD, dictatorship, totalitarian government

Tags: WWII, USSR, Soviet, soldier, veteran, shell shocked, injury, war fatigue.