Let’s expand on that a bit, we don’t need the full version here, basics will do.
There’s this post I read a while ago by @stormingtheivory about narrative logic and gender constructs, via weird avatars. I’m not specifically focusing on the argument they make in that post (sorry ivory, just discovered the @ function!) but the interesting thing about this to me is the way they’re drawing out arguments based on contrasting explicit “exposition” and description of the nature of the world and the implicit message given by it’s events.
The thing is, how do you say something by your work? Meta-fiction gives a good example of this, like a kind of test run for having your writing give an opinion on other events, by giving an opinion on other stories.
Suppose you have a character in your film say that superman is an awful reflection on human nature, yeah, you can do that, and it works on two levels compared to just making it up yourself; you can have it reveal the nature of a character, and rather than being some headcannon/theory/raconteur bullshit you made up to amuse yourself, it can be something that has immediate rhetorical force. To this character, it means something. There’s more to it than that, not only can you get people to sit through a monologue that if you started saying in real life, you would immediately have people skip ahead to argue with you, (and I mean, look at those youtube comments, change the form of media and those arguments can immediately start, suddenly it’s just some dude, like any other youtube commentator), but also you can have it reveal how the person who is saying it thinks, or thinks they think, which can allow people to understand what they did before or what they’ll do next, or how they’ll present themselves. It’s fun!
This can weaken, sometimes a character going off into a monologue is the authors ideas breaking through their story, smashing it’s consistency and characterisation for the sake of a point they can’t resist making, other times it’s cloaked and shaped by the characters that make it. Sometimes an argument must be spread over a number of characters in conversation, because it doesn’t make sense for one character to share it alone, which is where you start turning into Plato or Aaron Sorkin, where you have this particular set of characters together so they can collectively argue themselves towards the point you wish to make. (And if your not careful, when you get into writing it some of the characters will start going “gosh you’re right” for minutes at a time.)
But there’s a next level too, suppose you then place this argument within the world of the story, so that people arguing are not just acting as different perspectives to a dialog, there to shepherd it to your inevitable conclusion, but the argument is left unfinished, to be explored in events. Or a character makes an analogy with some other part of life, and then you explore that. Suddenly you can do things like having the events show that the words you wrote, although they sounded persuasive at the time, turned out to be false. Perhaps the Bride in Kill Bill proves that she can live as a normal person in a way that strengthens her rather than weakening her, perhaps President Bartlet realises that his disproportionate responses mean he’s now responsible for the reconstruction of another country, and has lost loads of allies.
This can bring two different messages, the most basic one being “beware of writers”, beware of good speeches and clever words, of arguments stacked with the right participants and restricted depictions of events that make the wrong thing look obviously right.
But then there’s all kinds of other messages, someone’s post-Kill Bill fan fiction can be a way of rejecting the arguments of that speech, especially if it does so in a way that reflects things from their own life, or well realised ideas about what it means to recover from terrible and destructive ways of relating to the world. And, while it’s doing all that, it can say something about Superman too, about how that character works, what it means to have a character with veiled power etc.
Or someone’s fan fiction about the war on terror being started by President Bartlet could reveal how that argument works in real life, with him stuck having to reconstruct a country, and loosing lots of allies.
Or you can also do what the west wing actually did and have another argument start later on in the same episode, and push things the other way again with more evidence, but somehow that seems less powerful, the proof of events seems more important than just what some character says.
And that, is a character arc. To me anyway. A character arc is when a character does or thinks something about themselves, and you explore the truth of that through the consequences of their actions, the events that happen to them, and the mix of circumstance, choice and destiny that you happen to think is reasonable within your genre. It’s the same deal as when you explore some argument that reaches outside of your story, except you’re dealing with identity and attitude in some broader way.
Homestuck is a world that’s full of destiny constructs, rewards and punishments. The story nearly, nearly, starts reflecting on what it means to have a destiny, what it means to have events twirl around and hit you with progress or just consequences.
There are a lot of stories out there that talk about arguments, tell you to suspect writers because they write good arguments, but this is almost a story that tells you to suspect plot, to suspect just deserts and heroism.
Compare the god tier destiny clock, Caliborn’s “mastery of the alpha” etc. is there a difference between these imposed destinies and the ones that come from character’s attitudes to themselves? What about Tavros’s dance moment?
But like I said before, just getting people to doubt the validity of arguments is only the most basic form of taking “saying something” beyond author avatars. The next level is actually saying something about how those arguments miss reality. To have one character say one thing about themselves, but then the opposite happens can be a really weak arc, in a fairly exact sense; it’s crap if you’re just saying “wow, sometimes people don’t know what they’re like at all I guess!”, just like plot can be crap if it’s just events unhinged from internal logic. It becomes more interesting the more that the reasons for their failure to understand themselves are themselves revealed, or if you say how they were actually right, but didn’t consider something else, or because life changed them in a way that people do change, and so on.
And for me this is a weakened theme because character’s don’t all maintain their voice, sometimes they go along with imposed destiny just because, or are drawn into becoming the narrator of someone else’s triumphs because someone needs to do it, but don’t necessarily show their own traits while they are doing it, like becoming the generals to their President Bartlet. Jade narrates a story, second hand, about John having another god-moment, heard through alt-Calliope. What does this story say about her understanding of destiny, or Calliope’s? How does she react to Calliope when they meet again, how does her reaction to what she is told about their common aspect reflect that? Does any of this come out when she meets someone else she is more familiar with?
Karkat finds peace with being pretty rubbish at playing the game, finding a victory at his own scale. Dave deals with serious emotional stuff, up front, John completes his destiny in the most speedrunny fashion, but maybe hasn’t actually learned very much, apart from knowing his friends better. Calliope and English descend into mythic oblivion, with Vriska, mistakenly chasing the “last boss”, and.. a lot of the other arcs are very unfinished. They’re unfinished because Dave’s tendency to blurt out massive speeches allows him to reveal the character development he’s done off screen during a massive time skip, and some of the opportunities the story has to be insightful about it’s own characters by posing situations in which they reveal character traits are skipped. And some of the endings of certain characters are distorted by the fact that they also happen similarly to other people. Karkat talks with Kanya in a cave, and it’s self-referentially him messing up a big ending talk, after he’s just watched Dave do one, but it’s also a missed opportunity in terms of interesting character-revealing writing.
Homestuck challenges the ideas of destiny and big rambling exposition speeches, and at the end falls back on them, in a way that weakens it’s ability to make a consistent statement. Take a slice of the comic, maybe Jade’s arc 4/5 arc of disillusionment and pragmatism, or Jane’s higher levels of emotional realism in terms of "How can living in this game not be goshdarn fucking you up? What kind of person do you need to be to cope with this? Maybe on drugs? Some kind of robot??" through arc 6/1-5. You can see developments of interesting themes, a character’s voice and perspective building up that the story does things with, subverting their expectations, or playing characters off each other. You can create these strips of narrative with these nice coherent themes based on how characters see themselves, or how we see characters. It doesn’t always last though, the themes fade, and the characters still exist, but without the obvious motivating forces they had before.
Like why does Jane get her villain crush on Vriska? Well she ignores what people say and makes stuff happen, and she seems sufficiently emotionally unbalanced to cope with upsets pretty well. At first glance Jane could see a lot she would like to be in her. This could have come up in how she described her, or in a later conversation with the Nanasprites. Or if there had been some point where she had properly met her most obvious contrast, John, not merely showing things about him by going through different versions of the same events, but actually interacting with him hearing about some of the things that happened to him, and talking to Roxy about it. Now that would be a conversation.
Anyway, this was supposed to be the basics, and I haven’t even properly started covering implicit parallels, alt-timelines and expys, and so I’m going to wrap this up now:
Giving all your characters arcs is unrealistic, just like characters making jokes that are always funny is unrealistic, or never having boring conversations, but you can put in just enough intentional crap to give the impression that it’s happening in the background, and edit towards the good stuff, or just try to make everything good and have characters sometimes respond as if it’s bad. So if Dave Strider’s going around saying “People don’t have arcs”, and most of the characters actually do, that’s interesting, that’s a reflection of his character and his avoidance of convention and destiny, and his occasional gaps in judging character, but if he’s saying that and, yeah, most of them don’t, then it’s like a character in a comedy show saying “people can’t be funny all the time”, you want it to be relatable, but not actually that true in the context of the events we see. Especially if you’re making this kind of exaggerated metaphysical meta-narrative stuff.
You can start with characters with ludicrous unreal traits, ridiculous quirks, but they slowly gain a nebulous kind of authenticity by going through development that treats their traits as if they were normal human weirdness, as if they were a joke, but also the developments of a concrete character that can be treated with the same care and attention, and so you end up saying all kinds of interesting things. Until you’re not.
In a way this is being harsh, in that this started off as an abstract kind of webcomic about people playing a computer game, and ended off on them completing the game, in an abstract fashion. But in another sense it’s really not, because this was a story about a game about destiny. That became about living up to your ancestors, justice, heroism, and all that, intentionally mangled by hacky gameness. As I said roughly before, it’s weaknesses are the times when it’s strengths don’t kick in, or when it doesn’t quite succeed at what it’s other successes imply.
