Whenever someone criticizes the characters in a piece of media, one of the first things you’ll see is that they didn’t receive enough development. Over the course of the story, they didn’t change their mindset or personality so that it’s noticeably different by the end. This mindset doesn’t just fall to the main protagonist, either. It also extends to the main antagonist, side characters, and basically every single character in a story. The term character development has turned into a buzzword as a way to attack boring characters, while not realizing the very real drawbacks that comes with wanting every character in a story to have development. Today I’d like to explain why it’s okay for characters to stay the same, and how character development isn’t the end all be all of storytelling.

Clarifications On Character Traits

First off, there’s an essential question that we need to answer; what does character development even mean? The more academic, literary definition is that character development is the collective observable changes in someone’s defining characteristics over the course of the story. The more standard definition is that it’s a major shift in a character’s personality over the course of a story. And this desire for every character in a story to go through an arc hurts a story in the long run.

The Issues With Character Development

There are plenty of reasons to not have character development. First, there’s the practical side. If you give every character an arc and personality change, it inflates the length of the story, and takes away moments from already existing characters. One of the biggest examples of this is One Piece. As the story has continued, each arc has ballooned in size. Part of that is due to the dozens of characters introduced in each arc, and how a good amount of them have some kind of character arc. While it does make for some interesting characters, it makes individual arcs as long as entire manga series and takes away development from Luffy’s crew. I can count the amount of moments Franky has in the second half of the story on one hand.

Then there’s cases where a character’s arc is too abrupt or poorly thought out. Just look at the main character of the anime Future Diary, Yukiteru Amano. After a certain part in the story, his personality does almost a complete 180. He goes from a coward terrified of the sight of violence and death to a cold, calculating villain who doesn’t care about who he hurts to complete his objectives. The issue is that it comes across as an edgy way to appear cool, and the character development just doesn’t work. This is why there’s another type of character, one that’s been attached with a negative connotation over the years – the static character.

Static Characters Aren’t Bad Characters

A static character is someone who doesn’t undergo any significant internal change across the story. The state they enter the story in roughly remains the same when the story ends. However, that doesn’t mean they’re boring, one note and forgettable. Static characters possess complex personalities and have dynamic interactions with other characters.

Need some convincing? You have The Joker, Batman’s arch nemesis and the most popular villain in the Batman franchise by a wide margin. At first glance he’s an insane lunatic, but underneath he’s extremely intelligent and cunning. The contrast between those two sides of him, and how he uses that to torment Batman, are more than enough to make him interesting. On the protagonist side you have Sherlock Holmes. He’s defined by his eccentric personality and fun interactions with characters like his assistant Watson. He’s a savant at deduction but at the same time lives like he’s homeless. He has almost no friends, and is a difficult person to interact with. If this identity of Holmes changed in a significant way, his appeal as a character would disappear. A character arc would hurt him from becoming one of the most famous characters in all of fiction.

I get why people enjoy character development and character arcs. It’s fun to see a character change and grow, to have someone to root for in a story. But like everything in writing, character development and arcs aren’t a requirement. Static characters have their place in fiction. The next time you complain about a character not having an arc, think about whether they need that arc in the first place to be a good character.