#I understand the impulse to raise the stakes for the protagonist through loss and isolation BUT | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

micamicster · 1 year ago

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Sort of related to the post I made yesterday I think a lot of authors dont consider that killing off one of their more prominent secondary characters actually serves to make their protagonist less interesting and less complex!

#Character is revealed through interactions with other people you take those people and interactions away?#Boom. Flatter character #I understand the impulse to raise the stakes for the protagonist through loss and isolation BUT #i think they are often not considering the downside from a storytelling perspective #if you ruthlessly prune characters in act II then you remove the relationship dynamics between them as well #and your protagonist has less to do and less places where they are revealed to the reader #removing characters who have a relationship with the protagonist makes it harder for the readers to develop a relationship with them #and your protagonist now has to carry the readers interest and the narrative on their own and lbh very few characters can do that #especially if we’ve only known them a hundred pages!

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