Is it possible for an aggressive character to become sensitive?
So I'm writing a story, a fanfiction to be specific, and a main character is an aggressive, emotionless, constantly angry man, who swears a lot and doesn't care much about anything. I want him to develop as the story continues, become more sensitive, emotional and caring, and eventually fall deep in love with someone and have strong feelings for them.
Do you think something like that would be possible? And if so, how fastly should his personality change? Should I include a terrific event that will change him?
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2 answers
You are writing a story, not a psychology textbook. Stories appeal to our hopes and to our sense that the world is (or our wish that it should be) a fundamentally orderly place, by which I mean a place with a fundamental moral order. Virtue is rewarded. Vice is punished. Love conquers all.
Whether you believe that the world actually has a fundamental moral order or not is a religious and philosophical question. But in story terms, people very much crave that sense of moral order. A fundamentally unjust universe is a little more frightening of a place than most of us are willing to live in day by day.
Stories provide a reassurance of the fundamental orderliness and justice of the universe that we need to get through our days. After all, how else could we have such strong feelings about endings. So much of our enjoyment of a story depends on whether we feel it has a good ending of a bad ending. Yet unless there is an order to the universe, how could one ending be good and another bad? Whether the real universe had a moral order or not, therefore, the story universe does.
So, if you want to write Beauty and the Beast (which is what your story is) you can write it because Beauty and the Beast is good story, whether or not it is good psychology. It is a story that has been written thousands of times, and it is a story that will be written thousands of time more.
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First of all, let's be clear: "aggressive and angry" is not "emotionless." He's either one or the other.
Second, "a bad man redeemed by the love of a good woman" can fall very easily into cliché. Try to stay away from the broad strokes of that.
If you want someone who's aggressive and angry to calm down and be concerned about others, you must get to the root of his behavior. Why is he like this now? How long has he been like this?
If there was some inciting event (e.g., someone he loved died), then he has to deal with that specific event and get past it.
If he had a rough childhood, or a rough life overall, then you have to explore that background to determine what taught him that aggression was a better solution than diplomacy. There is likely a lot of old pain and fear in the past, and maybe he found that anger made him feel strong and being tough scared off people who would have otherwise hurt him.
The most important factor is that people don't change unless they want to.
Simply putting your love interest (and/or Love Interest's genitals, depending on the rating of your story) in the line of sight of Tall Dark and Angry will not magically make him fall in love and start writing moony poetry. Something about Love Interest has to appeal to Tall Dark and Angry despite the anger and fear.
Someone who has been angry and aggressive for a long time is going to be slow to change, because these become ingrained personality traits. They are also often defense mechanisms. Tall Dark and Angry has to feel safe, and has to trust Love Interest enough to risk being vulnerable in front of this person.
That will take time. This should be a slow-burn romance.
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