The Permanence of Character Development

I meant to get ice cream yesterday, but I was given a muffin because Free Will is a lie. This past Thursday was the ten-year anniversary of the release of The Force Awakens. I considered writing the Saturday Note about it, but I’ve said a lot about it, so there wouldn’t be anything new. However! There are a lot of interesting thinkpieces and YouTube video essays about the movie out there that are probably better than what I can bang out for a Saturday Note.

Presently finishing up the first season of Percy Jackson on Hulu, and almost halfway through season three of Dark Winds on Netflix. Reading The Land Beyond the Sea, which is really, really good, but also really, really long, and I kind of want to be done with it already (almost made it the topic of the Saturday Note, but I’m not done with it, so that seemed unfair).

The Permanence of Character Development

How I Met Your Mother is a frustrating show in its finale. 

That’s hardly a controversial statement, given that the series finale is one of the most infamous endings to a television show, particularly a sitcom, in modern television. Last month, I was talking to my brother about the show, and we obviously had to talk about that much-hated ending. One thing we discussed is that part of the way it all comes to a close is because different characters’ conflicts and struggles, that had seemingly been resolved or conquered, came back and wrecked what the audience thought was supposed to happen. And we talked about how this is definitely a realistic place for the characters, because that happens a lot. A man who spent his entire adult life as a sleazy womanizer is going to have a lot of trouble walking away from that, yeah.

The problem with that, though, is that fiction isn’t meant to necessarily be realistic, it’s meant to be entertaining, and that requires consistency. So if you tell us that this character has changed and turned his life around, when you go back and say, “Nope! Actually, he couldn’t do that! That’s life!” 

Character development doesn’t have to be permanent, but its effects should have a lasting impact; otherwise, your audience is going to feel ripped off.

If you go through the effort of writing a character, and having this character learn such-and-such life changing lesson, go through such-and-such struggles, and come out victorious, and then if we see that character apparently not learn anything at all, we’re going to feel a bit cheated.  Okay, there are ways in which this can work: if the character clearly struggles, and we know it’s not this character’s end. I’m thinking of Zuko at the end of Book Two of Avatar: The Last Airbender. He seems to have been learning throughout the season that he shouldn’t have to bend to the will of the Fire Lord, only to go and do it anyway. But his story isn’t over then–and everything he’s learned still matters from that point on, especially because his “redemption” in the eyes of the Fire Lord proves to be very hollow to him, compared to how he feels about his Uncle Iroh’s opinion of him.

Thomas Raith also has a thing in Dresden Files–he seemingly reforms from his vampire ways, only to feel like he’s an irredeemable monster again after he’s viciously tortured by the sadistic skinwalker in Turn Coat. Except in that case, the door’s still open for him to learn again that he doesn’t have to be a monster, as Harry points out that he still loves Justine. And so even though he declares that he can’t change, we, the audience, know that he can, and indeed he still gets continuous character development throughout the following books.

So yes, characters can regress in their development, but only if it’s part of the ongoing story of that character. You can’t have the character go through a massive life change, and then say, “But then he went back to who he was at the start, because life happens, am I right?”

This is part of what makes Han Solo’s story in The Force Awakens–

[GOSH DARN IT we ended up talking about The Force Awakens anyway! I promise you this wasn’t really part of the plan.]

–so annoying. We don’t see Han Solo’s character as a continuation of where he was at the end of Return of the Jedi, we see him back to being a smuggler and petty crook. Except a bad one now, because despite his not dying skillz, he managed to make even more people mad at him for owing them money. Not only has the character regressed to his start, he’s gone even further backward, because small-time smuggler is how people think of the character rather than the character development he went through, and the movie is gunning for nostalgia.

But in the end, it makes his story really, really depressing and dumb, because the guy’s life seemingly went nowhere despite the incredible experiences he had over the course of the last few movies. And it makes the whole thing incredibly unsatisfying for all of us (except Harrison Ford, who has been trying to get the character killed off for decades).

In general, characters (at least, major ones) should change over the course of the story. That’s how they become memorable characters to the audience. If you reverse that change, think about how you want to do it–don’t do it for stupid reasons, and don’t make it so that the change the character did was invalidated. And for goodness sake, don’t put a character in reverse because it’s “realistic”; if your audience is invested in the characters and their development, that won’t cut it. 

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