Plot Over Character

 Good day! I probably have the song “Hunger” by Florence + the Machine stuck in my head because that’s a thing that’s been happening recently. Also I keep seeing headlines about cancel culture and what it means and this is weird because we started this conversation on Tumblr at least half a decade ago and now it’s entering mainstream--not for the first time, but on a much 

Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the Obsidian Trilogy. Which is pretty darn good, despite the fact that I’m going to be somewhat critical of it today.

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Plot Over Character

If you’ve taken a writing class, or read writing advice books, or just picked up someone’s rant on the Internet, you’ll notice that today, there’s a tendency to prize good character writing above all else. We have to understand the characters we read and watch or else we won’t care about their adventures. This isn’t actually the approach every author has taken to writing a story throughout the history of literature and art.

To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s okay for writers to forget to give their characters distinct personalities. But character development is a secondary to the Plot, or that character motivations aren’t what drive the Plot forward. And that’s fine.

The really big example is something like the film Excalibur, a retelling of Arthurian legend that’s not very concerned with character arcs. Oh, they’re there, but they’re not the focus of the story. The movie’s less concerned with getting into any of the characters’ heads and more into portraying the King Arthur story as cinematically as possible. And because of that, it’s able to cover, however briefly, a lot more material than most Arthurian adaptations. There are a few movies that cover the beginning, or the ending, of Arthur’s reign. There are a butt-ton of these movies that are laser-focused on the love triangle (and to be clear, Excalibur tells that part too). But Excalibur goes from Uther’s reign to the end of Arthur’s.

Likewise, right now I’m reading the Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. Character is not the series’s strongpoint. Which again, isn’t to say that it has terrible characters. It has some pretty great and memorable ones, actually (SHALKAN!). But it isn’t a character-driven piece, and the story isn’t too interested in developing those characters in a way that feels as if it’s driving the story.

For instance, our hero Kellen finds out that he’s a Knight Mage towards the end of the first book, and at the beginning of the second book he’s admitted to the Elven battle school so that he can learn how to use tactics and strategy along with his newfound combat prowess. We don’t actually see a lot of this training, because the Plot kicks in, but it does happen. But it feels a bit jarring that he rapidly becomes a very prominent officer in the Elven army, one with a pretty solid grasp on strategic maneuvers. In part because of his powers, I guess. But mostly because Plot said so, so we can’t bother stopping and asking too much about how his knowledge of these things develop, we’re busy fighting the Endarkened.

Again, this is in part explained by his powers, and in part because he’s had some training off-screen, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s been developed. It feels as if the character’s development has taken a backseat to making him do what needs to be done for the Plot. And it’s a good Plot, but I’d like to have seen how he gets this good, rather than him just being this good.

Likewise, we have Vestakia, a character who looks like a demon but has a human soul, and grew up in isolation because her mother and aunt wanted her to not be killed by demons, but also because everyone’s going to look at Vestakia and think she’s a demon. Despite this, after the initial prejudice is overcome by most of the people who meet her, she doesn’t really have any issues about this? And when she finds out that Kellen’s avoiding her because he finds her attractive, and he’s in the middle of a one-year-long vow of chastity/celibacy, she just finds it amusing. I found this a bit weird, as I figured someone who grew up alone from society and being called a monster by most everyone who looked at her would have more of a reaction to finding out that there was a guy who thought she was hot.

Also considering she’s Kellen’s love interest, for most of the second book, there is surprisingly little in the way of building their relationship? After that bit at the beginning they hang out together just fine without any awkwardness or really that much between them. And this is a bit weird, considering they end the trilogy deeply in love, and also this entire main story takes place within a year. This should be developed here!

And so I think that this is a good fantasy trilogy, it’s a bit lacking in the department of character writing. There are novels that work very well without being very character-driven too. American Gods (the novel, not the television adaptation) is also very Plot-driven, and while Shadow’s got character, a huge chunk of the novel is just him passively observing the weird stuff around him. A lot more happens to him than he actually does to the characters or world around him. He notes that after finding out his wife died while cheating on him, everything else is a bit less of a surprise. The television series deliberately changed his characterization to make him a less reactive protagonist.

American Gods is more of a showcase of American culture, a roadtrip through Americana. A story like Excalibur is a film that’s retelling a legendary story that’s been told a bajillion times over again and is covering tons of material. It’s more noticeable in Obsidian Trilogy because A) I’m rereading it years later and also B) because it’s framed as a character-driven story in its setup and style, but it’s really not. Being more Plot-driven is fine, but the story has to be geared that way, with a Plot. It has the time to have more character development, as they’re novels, but they just… don’t.

Learn what works and what doesn’t. Learn which stories are better suited to being Plot-driven, and which are better character-driven. And remember that being the former doesn’t give you the excuse to not have strong or interesting characters.

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