When a character has no development.
Every writer, reader, and fiction lover knows that characters have to develop, have to change, over the course of a story. I am going to do something very bold now, I am going to tell you: That is wrong. A character doesn’t have to evolve. Yes, the most compelling characters do evolve. Yes, evolving characters make for a more engaging story. Yes, character evolution is one of the main drives of storytelling. No, not every character has to do this.
Here’s why: there are two kinds of characters who don’t evolve.
- The character who isn’t allowed to evolve
- The character who doesn’t want to evolve
How to tell the difference? The first kind is not allowed to evolve because the writer has decided so. This might be because they are a villain and their sole purpose is to provide the hero with someone to fight. This might be because they are 2 dimensional. This might be because they are needed in a specific capacity to further the plot. All in all, the writer is the one who decided that this character shouldn’t be allowed to evolve.
The second kind is a coward. They are too scared of change, or they are too scared of letting go of their past. They cling to who they are out of fear of who they may become. Maybe they lost someone and are constantly trying to do what that someone would have wanted, never stopping to consider what they themselves want. Maybe they are unsure of what they want. Maybe they haven’t figured out who they are yet, and that scares them. Whatever the reason, something is holding them back and stopping them from taking a leap and evolving.
Let me give you a couple of examples here.
OBS the rest of this post contains spoilers for Once Upon a Time and Agent’s of Shield
Rumplestiltskin from Once Upon a Time
Despite his long timeline on the show, and how many different situations he is presented with, Rumple still always reverts back to one motive: power. At the beginning of his timeline, we see him in the first Ocre’s war, being told that his “actions on the battlefield today will leave his son fatherless”, and so he breaks his own leg to be sent home and avoid death. In other words, he is told something bad will happen and grabs on to whatever power he has to stop it: in this case self-mutilation.
Next up we see his wife leaving him because she’s ashamed to be married to the town coward. When he tries to get her back he is faced with the pointy end of a pirate’s sword. Faced again with a situation where he doesn’t have enough power, he takes the coward’s way out and goes home alone to his son.
We see him too, trying to save his son from going to the front line in the second Ocre’s war by running away – and this time he is offered the power he needs to never again have to run. He takes it.
Next time we see him, his son is unhappy with Rumple’s dark magic and tries to persuade Rumple to give it up. Rumple agrees to it, but in the end, backs out just at the last second. He loses his son that way. This then should have served as his wake up call, his motive to change. Instead, he uses dark magic to create an elaborate curse, trick the evil queen into casting it and Emma into breaking it. All of that was supposed to bring him to the world where his son took a portal, and it does. But when Rumple gets there, he still can’t let go of his dark magic, of his power.
When he finds his son, he can’t let go of it.
When he finds true love he can’t let go of it.
When he is cured of the darkness he can’t let go of it.
Rumple continues to lie, cheat, and deceive those he loves – despite numerous wake-up calls such as losing his son, Belle leaving him, and almost dying from a blackened heart. Rumple has ample reason to want to change, and he has a desire to change, a desire he expresses multiple times. But he always ends up going back to magic. Even when he seemingly had everything he could possibly wish for, when he had his happy ending. Why? Because the show needed a villain, and they had already redeemed the Evil Queen.
As a viewer, it was heartbreaking watching Rumple time and time again be forced back into old habits despite having made the choice to be happy.
Rumple was a coward, yes, but he had people enough around him to allow him to change, to give him a second chance. He would have evolved, have left the self-sabotage and darkness behind, if it hadn’t been because the writers needed a villain and he was it.
Grant Ward from Agents of Shield
In a chronological timeline, the first time we meet Grant Ward he is in juvie. He set fire to his parent’s house, his brother still inside, and they want to try him as an adult. He is abandoned by his family, and he doesn’t care. Then enters Garret, a Hydra Agent working undercover within Shield. He recruits Grant, teaches him all he needs to know, and sets him loose in Shield.
This encounter is significant because it was the first time someone ever took interest in Grant, ever “cared” about him. True, Garret only cared about what Grant could do for him, but to a love-deprived and abused teenager like Grant, the difference was both hard to tell and insignificant. And so Grant goes with Garret, and he forms his whole life, his love map, his morality, his sense of duty, around this one man who took an interest in him.
Then Grant is recruited for a special team by Coulson. Coulson is arguably one of the most fatherly figures within Shield, he takes in the people he thinks he can help, he sees them for who they are, he doesn’t try to change them, but instead seeks to further their own talents and merits. Unlike Garret, he doesn’t mold them to be what he needs, he helps them grow to their full potential.
Had Garret’s hold on Grant been weaker, Coulson would have been able to pry Grant away from Garret, to help Grant become his own man. Unfortunately, Grant is a very loyal person by nature, his bond to Garret was nigh unbreakable. It required failure in Garret himself for Grant to reconsider his loyalty. By the time Garret lost his mind, Coulson had denounced Grant. This left Grant with one family who had psychologically tortured him as a child, one father figure who had gone mad and died, and one none-biological family who now wanted nothing to do with him. In other words, it left him alone. Alone, and without allegiance to anyone. He had a clean slate. He could do pretty much anything. Except there were still two emotions wreaking havoc in his brain: love for Sky, and hate for his biological family. Since Sky wanted nothing to do with him now, he instead went after and killed his brother.
A little later we see him in a “loving” relationship with Agent 33. She has been brainwashed and lost all sense of self, including her face. She is literally a broken version of someone else, and she’s a tool. How does Ward react to this? Well, first he gives her a place to be – like Garret did for him. Then he starts rebuilding her, telling her not to pretend that she’s Sky for his sake, that he prefers her. Through this he creates a bond between them, just like Garret did by getting Ward out of juvie. He takes a lost soul and positions himself as a savior, as a mentor, as someone who knows what to do, and as someone who cares. Then Ward tells Agent 33 that revenge is the way forward, repeating his own pattern of killing those who stood against him.
When Shield kills her, Ward goes back to Hydra, back to taking orders, back to a cause he never truly believed in.
In short, Ward had a sucky childhood and got sucked into an unhealthy mentor-mentee relationship with Garret, and at the moment where he had a clean slate, where he could have done anything he wanted, where he could have remade himself – something for which he had all the right tools for, through his relationship with Coulson – he instead chose to go back to past events and let them define him. When he had the chance to help someone else get back on her feet, he again chose to look to the past and follow the pattern he was familiar with despite all that it cost him, ie Sky.
Ward is a character who is steadfast. When he gets something into his head, then that’s how it is. He remained loyal to Garret despite spending years seeing a better life, a better family, a better cause. He decided Garret was his mentor, his new father figure, and he never wavered. Even when Garret was no longer in the picture, when he was dead and gone, when Agent 33 was dead and gone, he still reverted back to Hydra because that was the opposite of Coulson, and Coulson was the opposite of Garret. He could have gone off and done something else, put it all behind him, but he stayed in the patterns of abusive and revenge, and because he had once chosen Garret over Coulson he remained on the side opposite Coulson.
The difference
What makes Ward different from Rumple is that there’s a continued pattern throughout all his storyline. Rumple had everything he wanted at one point, and then just pulled out the dark one’s dagger because “he wanted the power” or possibly more likely “because the show must go on, and the show needs a Dark One”. Ward had every chance to change, but every time he had a chance he had just suffered a great loss. Changing your entire life while dealing with a loss like those he suffered takes an extraordinary amount of will power, of bravery. If we remember that we are talking about a guy who never gathered the courage to ask out Sky before it was too late, who never found a way to get out from under his brother without it costing him everything, it does make sense that he wouldn’t have been able to or willing to change in those moments but would rather revert back to old and tried methods of surviving.
Plainly put, Ward’s lack of development is a pattern in the character, not just in the show. It doesn’t take the audience by surprise. And while it does make the plot move forward that Ward remains an enemy of the Shield team, it was never necessary because they had plenty of villains to fight.
Conclusions:
- Villains who are plot points before characters will stagger and falter
- People sometimes prefer the bad to the unknown, and that doesn’t make them a 2D character
- Putting a character on a chain and yanking them back every time they almost evolve will show up in the final product, and it will annoy readers or viewers.
- Watching a character repeat bad choices is heartbreaking
