Character Development Within Violent Content

Definitions of Character Development

Character development can be understood most broadly as the way a character’s background, traits, and behavior are revealed and portrayed over the course of a media narrative. For some researchers, particularly in literature and writing circles, a more specific distinction is made between the terms character development and characterization. In these cases, character development refers to the way a character’s disposition and personality change over the course of a story because of events that occur during the plot, such as when Ebenezer Scrooge evolves from a selfish and greedy miser to a gleeful and generous philanthropist during the course of a night of tumultuous and supernatural life-changing experiences in Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol. Characterization refers to the detail in which a character’s existing traits are related in a story through detailed description of the character’s background, appearance, dialogue, and behavior. For example, the characterization of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird takes place over the course of the entire novel; he is an honest, duty-minded, courageous, and humble hero throughout the story’s narrative, but Mr. Finch’s words and deeds establish the extent of these traits for the reader more and more over the course of the novel’s plot even though his fundamental disposition is more or less the same at the end of the story as it is at the beginning.

When considering the overall extent to which a media character is richly portrayed, though, these distinctions may be unimportant because both the revelation of a character’s traits in a story and the way that character’s traits change over the course of a story are dimensions determining the richness of that character. Therefore, the term development is also used more generally to describe a character who encompasses both of these elements of character exposition and more. A well-developed character in a media narrative is a character whose traits are revealed in sufficient detail that they are vivid, complex, and unique—often so much that some of a well-developed character’s traits may be puzzling or surprising to a media user. A “flat” character is not particularly well-developed and may represent a simple archetype, while a “round” character is more deep and complex. For example, the Wicked Witch of the West in the novel and film versions of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (along with most of the other characters in the story) might be considered a flat character representing a simple villain archetype, while the main protagonist, Michael Corleone, from the Godfather film trilogy based on Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name might be considered a more complex round character: admirable and deplorable elements of his persona are revealed, his values change and evolve, and contradictory patterns in his behavior emerge. The extent to which a character in a media story can be described as “developed,” then, is affected both by the characterization that is used to reveal the character in the story and by the developments that occur to change the character during the story’s plot. Under this usage of the term, characters can be considered to be round and thoroughly developed or flat and underdeveloped whether they are dynamic characters whose traits change during a story or static characters whose traits are relatively constant throughout the story; the key to a character’s development is how well those traits are described and how unique and complex they are.

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