Character development

Despite this being a key aspect of my personality and thought process for the vast majority of my life, I only realized in the last few years just how important character development is to me. Most of my favorite movies, books, and video games all have heavy amounts of character development in them, with a main character who is practically a different person entirely by the end than they were at the beginning. Even after having realized this, it took me a good deal of time to realize just how far that love of development spread, and where it had come from in the first place.

If you've never seen it before, I recommend that next Groundhog's Day you watch the movie by the same name. This is a movie that I legitimately watch every single year on the titular holiday. It's hilarious, but it also has a surprisingly well told story, and an immense amount of character development that takes place over a single day (technically). I've watched this practically since I was born, and only in the past couple years did it occur to me that it was probably a huge influence on me in that regard.

I suppose I can't accurately explain why it is that I enjoy character development so much, however. It's been instilled in me, but when you ask me to explain, it's hard to contain in words. There's just something so interesting about seeing a person grow. Especially when they so frequently go from being an absolutely terrible, despicable person, and in the end they are endearing and worth emulating.

A game that I feel really embodies this principle is Tales of the Abyss. The main character is a childish, spiteful, irritating little shit in every single regard. He has absolutely nothing going for him. But, having been thrown into a series of conflicts, treachery, and death, he finds a reason to actually be alive and to think and to feel, and - despite discovering he is not even the person he thought he was - becomes one of the most relatable and human characters that I think I have ever seen.

I feel like a lot of my favorite characters are ones that undergo these kinds of changes. They are also characters that I find many other people do not enjoy. I think people get stuck on how a character acts at the beginning of the story, and fail to recognize the changes that they go through throughout the story, thus missing out on the way they evolved and changed. I know I've done this before with some characters. Something about who they are at the beginning is just too irritating to let go of, and I refuse, whether consciously or not, to accept that they could be any better than how they started.

That's just an unfair treatment of a character, even if it is a common thing to do. Development isn't something that just happens over night, and it's not something that comes easily. It's a slow process. If a character is completely different at the end than the beginning, and you don't know how it happened, perhaps you should give that character a second try.

Of course, sometimes the writing is just bad and there really wasn't any development. But that's another issue entirely.