#discworld. granny and vimes are designated side characters who just happen to find themselves interacting with the real stories

[daisyachain]

In every work, there is a delineation between main characters and peripheral characters. This is more marked in non-realist fiction, where the story is more bound by conventions of narrative than imitations of history. Main characters, because of what fiction does, are more influential, independent, complex, unlikely, and remarkable than peripheral characters because they are the main characters. It wouldn’t work otherwise.

The conservation of character (save the most stuff for the ones that are important / focus the story around the most consequential characters) means that any reader of more than a few works will automatically consider the characters of a story in two different classes: those who do and those who don’t; paper dolls that interact with the paper scenery VS crayon outlines on the paper scenery.

In works that try to maintain a depth of detail similar to histories/to reality, the sharp delineation of main character from side character can break immersion. Functionally, it’s harder to make a story work if the main characters don’t think or do anything (though people have tried) and the side characters do. But, a work aiming for the emotional stakes of realism needs to convince you that the main characters are part of a greater world populated by fellow human beings.

When main characters ‘get away’ with improbable actions or side characters ‘get shafted’ by being assigned definite traits with no story arc, the expectations of a realistic world clash with the expectations of story. A side character given any details must be important, and if they are given detail without story, then it can feel like a failure of the work (even if the author was just trying to splash in some flavour). A main character loses resonance if their role in the story can only be explained by ‘these events needed to happen’ rather than by the emotional coherent choices of a plausible person. The boundaries between main and side characters must be maintained for a realist (non-formal) fiction to communicate effectively. If it’s formal……you get a bit more lenience when you can just write ‘this is the main character and you know it’ into the text.

Which brings us to: it’s easy to read a metatextual (am I using this right. Probs not.) hierarchy realistic stories. Side characters are, within their own world, designated losers. They can’t have any impact on their own lives, otherwise they’d be main characters. Nowhere is this boundary sharper than in RPGs. NPC story arcs have be handled on the side by one very busy co-author, while PC story arcs each get one author’s full attention. The NPCs are. Well. NPCs. Tulpas. Shapes of shapes of people, shadows of the shadows on the cave wall. They are imperfect imitations of PCs, which are themselves imitations of people that might possibly exist.

That then creates a massive opening in any RPG (video game or tabletop) to play with player or audience expectations about NPCs. If they’re predetermined to be city guards repeating the same line of dialogue forever, you can easily get a strong audience reaction from having them break out of these roles. The NPC is a creation that, ironically, is the character any audience member is most likely to be like. So the event of an NPC (a true NPC merchant in the town square) breaking into the story to influence it is catnip to Moi