Lesson 9: Character Arcs · 6:17am June 19th
Lesson 9: Character Arcs
A good character arc is instrumental to narrative storytelling, as the human element allows the reader to connect and reflect on the events unfolding. Although dramatic plots, thrilling mysteries, and high-stakes action can contain interesting concepts, they are all fodder if the reader doesn't have a reason to care. And although there are ways to make the audience care in ways that don’t involve characters, they can be a lot harder.
The question of “How will a character change?” is one of the key motivators for any character arc. I think one of the reasons why this can be so difficult sometimes is that it’s so vague and nonspecific while striking deep at a feeling that everyone is familiar with, the question of “what makes up a person’s identity?” Everyone feels this. From when we are young, to when we are professionals presenting ourselves, our work, our products, or our business, most people will engage with their own identity to present it in a certain way to everyone else.
In stories, some themes about identity will uphold that “our inner desires make us who we are,” while others will argue that “the lies and false faces we wear reflect the selves that we want to be.” Stories involving some kind of cyborg, memory transference, or other transhuman alteration of the body may address what it even means to be human as part of their themes, such as the classic idea that “our physical bodies do not define who we are.”
Fortunately, characters are not as complex as real people, and we can be selective about what parts to explore within a fictional person. Even so, your audience will have incredibly complex relationships with character arcs. Criticisms about characters often include phrases like “they changed too fast” or “that felt like a weird decision” or even more simply “I don’t know how to feel about that.” Although we all have different life experiences, humans are very in tune with what feels real and reasonable, so when an entire character arc or plot revolves around a character’s change that doesn’t feel right, there is an incredible sense of unease for the audience, because they start to be reminded that everything in the story is made up and arbitrary.
So when I cut away all the confounding details and boil down really good stories to the core of why they captivate their audience, I find one common principle: People change slower than their situation. The situation a character is in will almost always change before the character does. The result of that character arc is thus a direct response to alterations in the environment.
We have discussed characters previously in this lesson series, but in this installment, I want to explore deeper on how successful writing moves their characters along, using some of the most relevant recent examples in contemporary media. As such, this lesson may include references and spoilers for the following shows/series/films: Andor, Invincible, Blue Eyed Samurai, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
Input and Output
My first step for understanding how I want to structure a character’s arc is to clearly define a before and after. This doesn’t necessarily have to span the course of an entire story, but can be used at any time and at any scale. For example, most origin stories or introductions make the before and after very obvious. I can think of few examples better than Batmans’ origin story, where the input is an innocent rich boy, and the output is a traumatized rich boy.
Defining the input and output can have a strong thematic consequence or just be a way of moving the story along. If you are efficient, it can be both. I want to shift your attention now to the scenes from Andor at the very end of Season 1 Episode 9 and the beginning of Episode 10. Until the end of episode 9, Kino Loy, both a prisoner and manager of the other prisoners at an Imperial labor camp, has been adamant about keeping his head down and doing his assigned task until his sentence is complete because he believes that is the only sure way of getting his freedom. Even when the protagonist Cassian arrives and the sentences double, he does not waver. When Cassian insists he has a plan and asks for information on the number of guards, Kino stays quiet. But through his cynical and rough attitude, it’s clear that he doesn’t believe this out of any sense of loyalty or love for the Empire, it’s only because he has less than a year left on his sentence he sees obedience as the only hope for escape. So, we can simplify Kino to these two features:
- He wants his freedom
- He believes he can beat the system by playing by its rules.
For Kino, the first element of his character is a non-negotiable constant. He is a prisoner seeking escape, that’s where he’s at both physically and mentally. Thus, to move his plot along, we need to address the second element instead. In a sense, it’s an information plot element, where the key requirement to move the plot along is the discovery of additional information, or in this case, the truth that the Empire are not releasing prisoners when their time is up, but transferring them to another labor camp. This discovery reverses the second element of Kino’s character because now he understands that his original method was ultimately unviable, switching his mindset to:
- He believes the system will never let him leave, so he has to defy the system.
It’s important to note that Kino himself does not fundamentally change, but his decisions and actions by the end of his arc are the opposite from where he started. This happens seamlessly because while his internal character plot is changing from “Subservient to the Empire” to “Rebel,” the changes we see are happening in the information plot.
This style of character writing is different from what we see in family-oriented media, such as with My Little Pony and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, where a character’s internal arc will usually include a major personality change. For example, Catra stops lashing out at others for her own issues, and Starlight Glimmer realizes it’s wrong to force the world to conform to her own loneliness. These two types of character arcs differ fundamentally in where the “wrongness” or “incompatibility” is placed by the author. More simply put, who or what does the narrative blame for the problem?
“The Character is Wrong” vs “The Context is Wrong”
We’ve seen a strong example of when “The Context is Wrong,” with Kino from Andor. But what do character arcs look like when “The Character is Wrong?” By now even people who have not seen Invincible have seen the memes of Nolan Grayson, AKA Omni-Man, beating his son Mark into a bloody pulp in an attempt to show him how powerful their alien civilization is in the hopes that Mark will believe that the only choice is to join Viltrum and conquer Earth in its name.
It goes without saying that Nolan is unequivocally wrong. The show and comics make no attempt to befuddle this point. For his arc to progress, he is the one that needs to change, not the context he’s in. One way to see whether the character or context is changing is to look at the roles the character fits into. For Kino Loy, his character arc is going from obedient prisoner to rebel, but those things are not core to his personality, he doesn’t become less temperamental or more optimistic, he just changes the role he’s fulfilling. In Omni-Man’s case, his role remains the same—he is Mark’s father, Debby’s husband, and he’s still Omni-Man—it’s his personality that gets altered so that he can better fulfill those roles. He becomes more compassionate and empathetic towards other species, even if he sees them as lesser.
From a writer’s perspective, this gives us measurable goals and lets us abstract it into something much simpler. Nolan’s arc is the process of someone gaining enough empathy to realize the horror of his actions. To meet the dramatic scale of a superhero comic, something very emotionally impactful has to happen in order to invoke so much grief, empathy, and despair that Nolan hates the monster he has been and feels guilt for the lives he destroyed as a soldier of Viltrum.
This would be, going back to my lessons on plots and outlines, an exchange point for narrative capital. The narrative capital being exchanged is the emotional weight the audience has with Mark, the admiration Mark has for his father’s hero persona, and the tension and mystery built up around Omni-Man’s true goals for Earth. Nolan reconfiguring his son’s face into something resembling minced meat, but finally realizing that he doesn’t want to kill Mark, is the moment that is enough to convincingly purchase a new story state with the old one.
An Aside on Choosing Your Audience
I don’t have hard data, but it’s my feeling that family-oriented shows and children’s shows tend to focus on Arcs of Personalities more often than Arcs of Roles because younger audiences tend to experience personality changes more than they experience role changes. For children, roles are assigned to them; they take on the role of students, athletes, household assistants, sometimes can even be actors, models, activists, artists, singers, and so on, and they often have less control over the expectations to fulfill those roles.
In contrast, for many adults, the core of their personalities have solidified, and many changes that happen in the rest of their life are slow, gradual, and barely noticeable. Life goals also tend to solidify, and the things we want take on longer time scales. The only things that do change noticeably are the jobs and roles we pick up. Some people might start families and become a parent in less than a year. Promotions come around every few years, and you might be a salaryman one day and suddenly a supervisor the next month. So, naturally, the stories that compel adults tend to focus on role changes more than personality arcs.
This is a lot less relevant for fan fiction writing, but selecting and understanding your target audience is crucial for creative/literature writing. And although the modern audience has seen a gradual shift, with older adults maintaining an interest in young adult fiction, to the extent that “New Adult” has become its own distinct genre which aims at people in their twenties and even thirties, these distinctions are still broadly relevant.
That’s not to say all internal personality plots are inherently aimed at children, which is why the distinction of “family” film and television is so important.
Other Examples
Now I wanted to take a quick look at a few recent examples that have managed to produce very complex internal personality plots to see if we can use this method consistently and formulaically. In Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, Puss’s arc is to appreciate the life he has now and accept the reality of Death. Moreover, it’s also an arc of Puss redefining what it means to be “Puss in Boot.” By the end of the film, he does not change his roles—he is still an outlaw, stealing a governor’s ship and seeking adventure in lands far, far away—but he doesn’t live his life as if that legend and reputation is all he has. He goes from an arrogant hero to just a man, or cat, trying to live his life the best he can with the ones he cares for.
Similarly, the lone warrior Mizu from Blue Eyed Samurai takes a similar path, beginning the season as a swordsman seeking revenge on all four white men in Japan. Mizu’s role is explicitly stated by others to be that of a samurai, in this case the popularized version of a heroic, honorable, and noble warrior, and it’s this role that she constantly pushes against due to the selfish bloodshed needed to achieve revenge. However, Mizu ultimately has to accept not just the help, but the expectations, of others, in order to be more open and gradually fill the role she has inadvertently begun to embody.
And going back to Andor, the titular character Cassian Andor has almost the opposite arc compared to Kino Loy. No matter his intentions, Cassian has always been a rebel and outlaw. However, for much of the first season, Andor is a rebel fighting for himself. Only by living through the new oppression of the Empire, and realizing that no matter where he goes, he can’t outrun it like before, does Andor understand why he has to fight for more than just himself and become a rebel for the Rebellion.
I think one can argue that Andor’s role does change here: that he goes from being an independent rebel to an insurgent with a cause. But to identify whether this is truly an Arc of Personality or Arc of Roles, we have to consider the character’s goals. If their core goals/motivation changes, then it’s likely that their personality is changing more than their roles. Kino Loy’s goals, for example, are completely steadfast—It’s freedom, it’s about reaching that “one way out.” If there were any easier way of escape, he’d take it. But for Andor, he started off wanting money to fly himself and his mother away from the Empire and just lay low safely, fully prepared to leave his home behind. By the final episode, when presented with a chance to escape with his closest friends and family, he turns it down, instead offering himself to Luthen, a key leader in the growing galactic rebellion. The rebel is the same, but the person is different.
Convincing Change
What sells these characters arcs is that the before and after both have to synergize with the context the character is living in. We can see this plainly in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with Miles’ arc of going from being a joiner to being independent. Miles is an interesting character study because of how many parallels there are between different elements of his identity.
The film hints to a lot of this in its opening as well as the previous film. He takes after his Uncle Aaron in some ways, having a strong artistic side while his parents would prefer if he focused on his studies more. He has a black-hispanic background, but does not fully embody the identity of his mother’s heritage as hinted by his B in Spanish and use of Spanglish. Miles is, in short, a fusion of incomplete identities who doesn’t wholly fit into the groups presented before him. It’s even inherent in the recurring theme of the movie: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” You can’t have it all, you can’t explore two mutually exclusive choices and enjoy all the benefits of both. To which Miles responds with: “Unless you bake two cakes.”
It’s ironic that he gets that optimism from being Spider-Man. Because, as he has claimed before, “Spider-Man can always do both.” That’s why he starts the film as a joiner, because being Spider-Man is the only identity he thinks he fully embodies, and being around other spider people will validate him in a way that he doesn’t experience anywhere else. However, it’s not so simple, and by the midpoint of the film, Miles realizes that he isn’t like the other Spider Men when they stop him from saving his father after finding out that his dad is basically destined to die.
Miles believes he can save his father from a “canon event” while also preserving the stability of his dimension, but all the other spider people disagree, even invalidating his assertion that it’s possible to “always do both.” And moreover, the reason he was kept in the dark about all the dimension shenanigans was due to his “spiderness” being called into question. He gets called an anomaly, someone who was never meant to be Spider-Man, someone who doesn’t belong.
The poetic nail in the coffin is that the one to say this to Miles is Miguel O’Hara, an Irish-Mexican Spider-Man who is depicted to speak Spanish more fluidly while Miles’ voice actor delivers a choppier and Americanized Spanish. Miguel (Spiderman 2099) even possesses that Hispanic identity that Miles failed to fit into at the start of the movie, and that person is now telling him he doesn’t even belong as Spider-Man.
But Miles refutes it all with the simple declaration: “Nah, Imma do my own thing.” He holds onto the idea that he can save everyone as Spider-Man. He rejects the idea that the interdimensional spider society represents what it means to be a “true” spider person. And it’s all based on a very simple and very believable desire to prevent his father’s death.
This is very clearly an Arc of Personality. Miles’ goals completely change from the beginning of the movie to the end, while maintaining that he is Spider-Man. And it’s a believable response to having his mental image of what the “spider identity” stands for. He points out how “messed up” it is that they’d let people die just because it serves a “greater good,” even going so far as to tell his crush and friend Spider-Gwen that she shouldn’t have even brought him to the society.
I believe if his father’s life, or anyone’s for that matter, wasn’t in danger, Miles may not have challenged the idea that he wasn’t a “real” Spider-Man, because his mental image of the other heroes would not have been broken. It’s that complete disconnect between them that motivates Miles to stand on his own and embody an identity that he made for himself. And by the end of the film, that identity is an independent hero who is even a role model for others like him.
Well said friend