today i watched season 3 episode 5 of Teen Titans - "Haunted"
the episode is clearly about Robin having PTSD from being in an abusive relationship with Slade. He's hallucinating, he's certain he has to do it on his own, he gets angrier and angrier at his friends for being incompetent because they're telling him that they're not finding evidence of what he's claiming. they even give him a health-scan mid-episode and are like "nothing is wrong with him from what we can see" and starfire is like "no there must be something wrong! he wouldn't yell at me like that! that's not the robin i know!" and we literally get a scene where Raven goes into Robin's mind and is like "oh shit, slade might not be real, but he's real to robin, and slade is winning"
overall it was a good episode - though, the last moments in the episode are a reveal that it wasn't actually PTSD at all, it was actually a secret dust that puffed out of Robin's "Slade Box" which was a chemical that hijacked Robin's nervous system.
strange way to end an episode that dedicated so much time to building out the fact that this was PTSD only to not have it be PTSD lmao
i do really love that the first scenes of Haunted are set in the rain, with every character but slade having the rain bounce off their body - the first indications that he's not real.
and yeahyeah, metaphor, i get it. but this was not setup like a metaphor.
the next episode i watched (s3e6) is about Raven wanting nothing more than to read a book alone in her room, only to discover The One Guy Who Understands Her is literally magically trapped in the book and if she just listens to him they'll get to be together forever..... but it turns out The One Guy Who Understands Her is actually an evil dragon a la Sleeping Beauty; and that she got used and thrown away.
that's clearly Not Actually About Magic Guys In Books, the metaphor is lived out through the episode, not tacked on at the end.