I love a good character arc. There are some pretty epic ones out there, and there are some terrible ones and one of the worst things about creating a character and letting them grow is when you then shoehorn them into something in a way that doesn't fit. The best example, and the one which prompted me to write this is the character of Alex Karev in Grey's Anatomy. Spoiler alert for Season 15/16.
From season one, Alex Karev is a douche bag. He's a shark, he's occasionally incompetent, he's aggressive and he's very reactionary and it makes him a pretty abrasive character, but as the seasons continue, you see more of what it behind all of that, and when he's got some stability in his life, having a good job, a home and all of those things which help us to feel a lot more secure. You see his trauma and as he grows up a bit he learns to deal with it a little better and becomes something close to a decent human being, and someone that you can have a lot of sympathy for and also someone you can really root for and not just because he is a scrappy little underdog. And then he leaves the show with a letter saying he's going back to his first wife, who left him and he realised he was better off without her, left his second wife, and started raising kids with the first, who had a five percent chance of surviving a couple of years and this is over a decade later. It's as if the character arc got filled up with all these wonderful things and just at the point of casting off to survive the flood, someone shoots a flaming arrow into it and it burns and the wreck sinks and it all sucks.
One of my favourite character arcs, and this is not just because I think Liam Hemsworth is hot stuff, is Gale Hawthorne from The Hunger Games. At the beginning of the series, he's an annoying kid and has this idealistic view on the world. By the end of the series, he has changed to the person that would be okay with dropping a bomb on Primrose and other innocent people in order to defeat someone that he sees as a tyrant. Granted, he's kept the naivety, because he doesn't see that the person he is fighting in the name of is just as much of a tyrant as the person that they are fighting against. People justify their actions in different ways, but there are times when the destruction that he character saw and the wilful disregard for the lives of others does rub off on you, and the citizen that support a system seem just as bad as the armies who fight for that system, and within that, Gale changed a lot. The trauma his character saw, both through his life, through The Hunger Games where he watched the woman that he loved fighting for her life, and then he watched whilst the place he had grown up and the people he had grown up with were decimated by people that they were made to serve. It's a really good character arc. It's familiar, but it's written well and played well.
Developing character arcs is time consuming, and it is interesting and it is beautiful, but it means that you need to make sure that anything that is wildly out of character has a reason, and it better be a bloody good one.
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