Comments on How do you make characters change believably?
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How do you make characters change believably?
Changing is an important aspect of every character and is what makes them believable. Yet, if you remember the ending of Game of Thrones,
people weren't too happy about Dany going from "don't want to be the queen of ashes" to The 1666 Great Fire of London.
Don't get me wrong, as an outsider, I was laughing and stuffing my mouth with Stardust Crusaders Season 2.
Regardless, a vast majority of people screamed
"This isn't Dany!" or "This isn't my Dany"
Though it's unlikely for such extreme examples to occur, it does pose the question of how can you change or even make a character do a complete heel-face turn without feeling "out of character" for them. And there's also the question of separating fluctuations, where a person makes a decision based on the natural equivalent of RNG, and character breaking moments.
You could say it happens in response to an event but, more often than not, people don't learn from their own mistakes (just look at the track record of my questions) even when it's all there, black and white, clear as crystal.
Knowing this, let's make the question more focused: What starts and keeps character development in motion?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/48076. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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First, TV serials are virtually impossible to end in a way that satisfies the audience. The whole dramatic structure of a TV drama militates against bringing it to a dramatically satisfying conclusion. The probably applies to book series to. The whole art of the serial is to subvert the traditional story form that comes to a crisis and then resolves. A serial cannot come to a true crisis, because then it would have to end. It must repeatedly come to a faux crisis and then reset. Its players are chosen and designed to do this. And so they are not designed to come to a great climax and resolution and the attempt to bring them to one is almost always going to fail.
Second, people fight and then make friends all the time. At least, men do. I'm not sure that that works with women in the same way. But you can see it with men in combat sports all the time. Fighters who have been spewing vitriol at each other for weeks in the lead up to the fight hug each other when the fight is over.
Part of this is that men (combative men, anyway) admire an equally spirited and courageous combative man, so, win or lose, they admire the opponent who fought courageously (and despise the one who did not). Second, many relationship, especially between men, involve an alpha and a beta. Often they fight to establish who is alpha, but once the defeated rival accepts their beta status, they happily follow the alpha.
Often in life, and in literature, it is not really a matter of pure good vs. pure evil, but a matter of people finding a place in society. A fight can establish your place, whether you win or lose, so once your place is established, there may be no reason to fight and thus an occasion to make friends.
Finally, a fight may change your view of which cause is the good one. It is a literary axiom that the villain believes themselves to be in the right. A fight is a test of values and of virtues as well as a test of strength. Often, seeing the conviction with which people fight for a cause is enough to cause other people to adopt that cause. (We are fundamentally more attracted to people we admire than to abstract causes we agree with. Evidence of this is everywhere. It is why prophets can change society so quickly and so easily when they appear with the right charisma at the right moment.)
In short, people do not change willy nilly, but they do change in response to the behavior of other people, whether that behavior is admirable and courageous or cowardly and contemptible. Look, therefore, to the psychology of affiliation and admiration to understand were sudden shifts of allegiance may come from.
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