Sanctuary

The first two or three minutes of season one, episode one of TNT’s Leverage introduces us to an alcoholic who used to be an investigator for a massive company that insures art.  Used to, because as soon as his son took ill they refused to cover a treatment that could have cured him.  Now he is childless, divorced, unemployed, and utterly without direction.  His name is Nate Ford, and his case is infamous.
 
After taking up an offer from someone who claims to have been robbed by a rival company, he is grouped with three thieves he has chased in the past.  We know their names and specialties and the fact that they all have distinct personalities.  That’s about it.
 
Okay, to be fair, we know Parker (no other name given) stole a stuffed rabbit and blew up a house when she was a kid.  We know Alec Hardison once hired a bunch of girls to dress up in gold bikinis a la Princess Leia and fight with light sabers (GEEK PRIDE!).  Eliot Spencer’s flashback reveals that he retrieved a baseball card by beating up a host of guys with guns and didn’t even spill his coffee.  Later on, when we meet future team mom Sophie Devereaux, it’s revealed that she and Nate have a long history together.  Since this initial introduction, we have learned very little else about any of these characters’ pasts.  But exactly how much does that detract from the experience?
 
The fact is that we’re dealing with amazing characters and a cast with absolutely incredible chemistry, but what part does their past play in all that?  The writers of the show try quite consciously to leave most of their backgrounds as blank slates, but are they really doing themselves any favors that way?  It would probably be more problematic if they weren’t revealing the characters’ hidden depths in such a way as to keep background information secret.  It’s an interesting take on character, and one most authors wouldn’t dream of.  After all, what is a more ripe and easy source of depth and angst than a dark, secretive background that’s revealed almost first thing?  The fact that the writers of Leverage are able to create such fascinating characters without falling back on background alone is very telling, and other writers and shows could learn from this example.  After all, in the end, the show is about the characters as they are, not as they used to be.  So why are fans crying for more background information?  Well, there are two reasons.

First of all, the audience expects to have background information on the characters they love.  It’s not a sense of entitlement that causes this so much as out-and-out curiosity and love for the character.  We want to meet Nate’s father not because it's convention, but because we love Nate and want to know as much about him as possible.  We like hearing that Hardison was a foster kid and Eliot used to be claustrophobic.  We take joy in the information and devour the tidbits each episode throws at us.  If you’re dating someone you’re really interested in, you want to see their baby pictures and hear their parents talk about them.  It works the same way with characters.

Second of all, we want character background because, frankly, it’s essential to the character.  It’s not that a character’s history is useless when it exists only in the mind of the author, but the audience needs to be able to place the current story in the context of the character’s life.  For example, Parker, who has one of the most fleshed-out backgrounds on the show, has a clear motive for staying with the group.  We understand, because we have the context of her history, why these people are so important to her and that this is very much a unique life experience for her.

However, the amount of background we know has little to do with this.  Technically, we have “enough” background on Sophie simply because we do understand the events of the series in the context of her life.  All the same, we have very, very little information about her history.  Contrast Eliot, who we have even less on, and whose motives remain a mystery even though we see many, many facets to him.  As a result, he may be the character hardest to relate to on the grounds that we don’t have the context with him that we have with the others.  Does that make it meaningless when we see him compassionate, angry, or annoyed?  Absolutely not.  It’s still character depth, it’s just out of context.

Nonetheless, character background is not the only thing that makes a good character, as Leverage shows very well.  What relevance does Parker's past have when she and Eliot are acting like little kids together?  Do we have to know who Sophie's parents were in order to relate to her identity crisis?  Do we need to know, this moment, what landed Hardison and Parker in foster homes when they were kids?  Not really.  What’s important is that they have that common experience, even if they were different experiences, and can connect to each other on a deeper level than before.  When Eliot chooses to champion a young victim of child abuse, does his motivation come from his past or from his own capacity for compassion?  The important thing is that he is compassionate, and that this is a tender side of him we’ve never really seen before.  I actually prefer to think he, like most people, finds child abuse reprehensible without having to dig up some dirt from his past.  It speaks more to the type of person he is that he finds it horrible without having to be shown firsthand.

The fact of life is that who you are right now is not who you were years ago.  Authors who fall into the trap of defining a character strictly by their past should keep this in mind.  People change, grow, slide down the slippery slope, and change even more.  Their past is past, the road that got them to where they are, the road that has branched out and will continue to branch out into other roads, a network of choices and experiences.  Leverage makes the important statement that a character, and indeed a person, is not limited to what they have previously experienced.  Our stories are still being told, and so are theirs.

I’ll say it straight out, with no shame: some of my favorite characters are undeveloped.

A problem that’s going around is the use of the term “developed” as a synonym for “well-rounded” or “fleshed-out” or “realistic” when applied to a character.  The term “character development,” when used properly, indicates that a character changes over the course of the story, for the better or for the worse.  It’s part of the character’s story, not the author’s abilities to write a good character.  So when people say a character is “well-developed,” they probably mean something else.

Why am I nitpicking?  Because I think that, similarly, the term “static character” has negative connotations.  “Static” does not mean “shallow,” “simple,” “stock,” or “boring.”  A static character is merely a character who does not change over the course of the story.  This lack of growth (or corruption, or redemption) can be part of the character’s appeal.   A lack of change in the character can be compensated for by revealing aspects of the character’s personality as the story goes along, as if the audience is getting to know the character the way they would a person.

Take, for example, Bob Cratchett.  Bob is a static character.  There is very good reason for this—he is already a decent person, and is not the man in need of character development.  He is an unfortunate and very sympathetic character.  He doesn’t need to change because we still see him shift through many emotions.  After Ebenezer Scrooge gets his character development, we are overjoyed to see Bob Cratchett getting what he is due (a raise, a merry Christmas, medical attention for his baby boy, etc.).  We identify with him as a struggling, working-class father and husband.  The fact that he doesn’t change is a good thing, because he is a character who is, in the beginning, in stark contrast with Scrooge and the yardstick (or meterstick, for the sensible metric-system-using peeps) against which we can measure Scrooge’s development.

We can learn from examples like the one above that static characters are necessary for most works of fiction.  So complaining that a character “doesn’t change or learn anything” isn’t necessarily a valid complaint.  Sometimes a character’s lack of ability to change can speak against them as a character (especially if the character is a villain), but it can also speak for them (if the character is able to resist corruption, although presumably if one is tempted and resists, they have grown stronger from it and are therefore dynamic).

I’m gonna take an example from an opera, because I can.  In Don Giovanni, the title character is resolutely static, given multiple chances to repent and refusing every time.  His valet, arguably, is the only dynamic character in the opera, growing from a gleeful accomplice to a horrified, repenting man who generally must be forced to obey.  It’s a rare example of the protagonist being a static character, even if Don Giovanni is a villain as well as a protagonist, and his unwillingness to change is the entire point of the opera.

Other really good static characters:

-Faramir and Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings (the book, not the movie)

-Adrian Monk (for most of the series)

-Captain Jack Sparrow in the first movie only—the one that made him popular—after which he got some GORGEOUS character development

-A great deal of popular JRPG characters (such as Sigurd, Jessie, and arguably Citan from Xenogears, Ayla of Chrono Trigger, and half the cast of Final Fantasy VIII)

-Nearly EVERYONE in the Quest for Glory series except for Katrina

-Michelangelo from many incarnations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (though he’s more dynamic in the comics and the 2003 animated series).  Also Splinter.

In short, a static character is not necessarily a “flat” or “bad” character (though there’s a place for flat characters as well), just one who happens to come out of the story with the same traits they had going in.