Overdosing on Character Development · 12:26pm Apr 25th, 2019
I finished all of Thundercats (2011)!
Um. It was alright.
Do I recommend it? Eh. 
I do recommend watching episode 4, "The Song of the Petalars" because it's really strong as a stand-alone story.
Actually, a lot of episodes were pretty good one-shots. Good animation, good writing, a few interesting themes. The backstory reminded me of Xenogears, weirdly. Yet somehow the show added up to LESS than the sum of its parts. It's not a bad show, I think, just kind of mediocre. It's easy to rip apart something for being bad, harder to figure out why it was almost good.
What originally caught my interest is how each episode has its own self-contained plot, and that gets tied into character development. For example, there's an episode based on Moby Dick about a mad sea captain, in which Lion-O learns what it means to be a responsible leader. Sprinkled throughout are some two-parters for major events, helping to form a continuous plot.
The show ends on its 1st season with the characters only getting 2 of the 3 macguffins, and since there's no 2nd season there's no conclusion to the story. LATE SPOILER WARNING--- ah, whatever. In the middle of watching, I actually forgot what the macguffins even do. But every episode is about character development and growth, and that's what really mattered!
Or is it? Despite all the character development, I couldn't actually say what their arcs are about. It was rather forgettable...
This blogpost on character development as a story crutch came to mind. I was surprised I never really considered that, since character development is nearly always praised as a good thing. People love it, therefore all stories should provide it, right? Completely by accident (while trying to look up a dry literary definition of the term), I found that this isn't a unique opinion.
At one point when I learned the term "bildungsroman" I actually wondered why that didn't apply to every single story, because internet reviewers had drilled into my head that every story needed to have character development, or else. This is why I don't learn terms anymore.
So I couldn't think of anything to apply that to until Thundercats, and it all seemed to fit my initial idea: the show lethally overdosed on character development. There's so much that none of it feels meaningful! On closer examination, I think there's a lot more nuance to this, but it still makes for a funny blog title. 
So there's a lot of character development, but since it's a largely episodic show, it's almost as if the writers were all competing against each other to have their episodes noticed. In a great movie, let's say Star Wars SPEED RACER, there's only a few of these moments in the arc, not twenty-something, but that's because of the time limit. Yet when I think of a TV series like Gurren Lagann, which is also a mostly episodic structure, there's only a few moments where Simon grows. And they're huge, awesome moments that serve as major turning points. They're unforgettable. It's the whole transformation part of that Hero's Journey thing everybody's heard about.
As a counterpoint, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has a much higher ratio. In the first two seasons, nearly every episode was written for the purpose of learning a friendship lesson. Yet MLP falls into a very different genre, being mostly about everyday life in a little town. Thundercats has much more in common with Gurren Lagann, as well as Star Wars SPEED RACER, all of them being about a band of heroes traveling across the world on an epic quest to stop an evil empire.
So maybe it's a genre thing?
Though it took me a while to realize: the Thundercats don't actually save the world that way. Not another jab at its cancellation, I mean the plot of the season finale. They're saved from Mumm-Ra by the combined powers of all the different animal-peoples they met and befriended along the way. The show hints at a serious theme where the cats were themselves abusing their greater power to lord over the other races, and now that they've fallen the heroes have to confront with the wounds of the past. So all their new friends return to help them out in Cloud City. It's not really an arc where the protagonists needed to find their own courage and inner strength and all that, it was about making friends.
So that's why all the character development fell flat, because it wasn't really the arc. If done intentionally this could be valid, but I still think it's actually dissonant here. Each individual episode's arc DID depend on the characters growing and learning lessons and becoming better people, and gaining allies was just an unintentional side effect, out of the spotlight. Sometimes. Except the races who actually were evil and had to be defeated. It all felt almost like a thematic retcon.
The finale is unsatisfying because it's the completely wrong payoff. But even ignoring that other arc going on, the character development never gets a chance to show how it sticks. I already mentioned the "huge turning point" pattern, which itself implies a before & after. With this constant stream of episodic lessons, none of them ever seem to get a callback, or even a slower moment to reflect on them. There's the two-parter episodes where bigger plot twists happen, but those are also solved themselves with their own self-contained lesson, detached from everything else.
In some ways this is a similar problem that MLP faced sometimes. Whether characters were "backsliding" or not is debatable, but now I can understand some fans had a fair reason for making those complaints. The characters very rarely got those payoff moments that they deserved. Twilight Sparkle got to be the focus in all those two-part adventures, so her character development at least feels earned, because she's given a chance to prove it now and then.
The other characters really needed episodes like those too, but they got ignored too often. Or even outright botched, such as Rainbow Dash joining the Wonderbolts with little fanfare, only to immediately get served another slice of humble pie. Again, more character development than was needed! A much better payoff is something like the season 1 episode "Sonic Rainboom": Rainbow Dash doesn't need to learn anything, she just needed to be herself to become the star of the day, while Rarity learns her lesson. See also Applejack's "I didn't learn anything!" cider episode. (both written by M.A. Larson? coincidence 
)
So yeah, even a show all about character development knew when to put on the brakes for good effect! Though uh, lately it's been permanently parked, amirite?
This subject did get me thinking about episodic stories in general, and how it's important to have those little bits of variation to make it feel like the meta-plot is actually going someplace. Everything in this blogpost so far, I didn't realize any of it after watching Thundercats. I had no idea what it was doing wrong. I only started thinking this much about it while watching a different show that seemed to get everything just right.
I've become addicted to Heartcatch Precure. It's a children's anime meant to sell toys. And it is so awesome. 
Heartcatch Precure is one of those magical girl shows that follow the tradition of Sailor Moon, which borrowed heavily from the Super Sentai genre to create a hybrid genre full of action. This means a VERY restrictive episodic formula: slice of life, friend has a problem, monster-of-the-week attacks, the girls blow it up with sparkly magic. Yet it finds a lot of gaps between the bricks of the formula to grow something meaningful.
Each episode is about character development, but usually focusing on the side characters in the heroines' daily lives. They're relatable and sympathetic, and that you want to see them saved from the monster, so they can go back to solving their real-world problems. Three of the recurring villains are weak goofballs, you know their whole purpose is to lose every single time. However, the fourth, Dark Precure, is powerful and dangerous and she always beats the heroines in a fight. This makes the bad guys feel just enough of a serious threat, even though 90% of the episodes are the feel-good triumphs where the good guys dramatically save their friend. The show gets to have its cake and eat it too.
Building on this, the episodes where the heroines lose don't have a friend at stake (that might get too dark), but instead the spotlight is on revealing more of the main story. There's the mystery of their fallen predecessor, the villains' evil plan, and the main characters can get development of their own. However it doesn't make a repetitive formula out of this either, but switches it up by sometimes weaving those plot threads into future regular episodes as well. It feels surprising and special each time, because it's not the usual. (The usual is still very pleasant too, since it has so much heart to it)
Something tells me this type of pacing isn't new or unique to this show, but it's so perfectly executed. And when the development payoffs arrived, I was really blown away. It's the polar opposite of the impression I got from Thundercats: most individual episodes feel low-stakes and comfy, yet the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
or maybe Thundercats just needed to be more pink and girly. 
I've not watched a lot of TV shows, so I'm sure there are better examples, but one show which I thought did the episodic formula with overarching storyline really well was the early seasons of Burn Notice.
I agree when it comes to "character development". I think what's equally interesting is learning about who a character really is, beneath the facade, thus revealing something about human nature and how we all function deep down. I think this is why it's often memorable when a character makes a choice, even though that choice isn't them changing (though it can be the result of a change). Luke choosing to forsake his training and go help his friends in Empire Strikes Back, for instance. Or Han shooting first. Obi Wan letting Vader kill him in front of Luke. It can even be argued that Vader saving Luke at the end wasn't so much a development as finding that spark of good buried at the very center of his being and pulling it out--something that was already present in him.
Stories usually push a character to change in a certain aspect, and after enough pushing they give in. "Be less selfish." "No." *Negative consequence negative consequence* "Okay fine." But the character can actually resist to the end, demonstrating something about them at their core, and I think that's meaningful. "Be less selfish." "No." *Negative consequence negative consequence* "Still No." That second no has more weight behind it.
A book on writing I read said choices made under pressure reveal true character. It gave this example which I always liked: a hunter meets a bear in the woods and it attacks him. He scrambles out of the way, up and down trees trying to escape. Finally there's a clear path of escape behind him. Then, in front of him, he notices his rifle sitting on a log between him and the bear.
What does he do?
Whichever choice he makes will be meaningful, because it's revealing something deep about the hunter we didn't know. It's showing us the kind of person he is. This is the joker's line in the Dark Knight after the interrogation scene when he says that in their final seconds of life people reveal who they really are.
So I think that instead of functioning as a vehicle of change for a character, a story can spend its entirety digging as deep into a character as possible. Or put another way, seeing how far down a trait or set of traits go, and what's beneath them if they don't go all the way. The deeper the story pushes, the more universal it becomes, I think.
Most stories I think mix both, character development and character revelation.
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I think that's a really good point, that character development is just one side of a coin when "choice" comes up, and the other side is equally important. like many examples where like a superhero chooses not to change, and tells the villain "no I'm sticking to the good side"
and it really annoys me that only one side of that coin seems to get respect, and is taught as The Correct Way to Write Story. it feels like a way to legitimize only certain types of older story formats like novels and movies, while rejecting newer modern formats like TV shows or comic books from being "real stories" because they often rely on static characters. but it's a similar snobbery to someone who says only sad tragic endings count as real literature, just because it's a preference
Akagi was one of the examples in that original blog I linked, and it's a strange story where the main character literally never changes or develops, even when his life is at stake. and it reveals more about human nature than most character-growth stories I've seen
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Sorry for the delay!
Yeah exactly, I was thinking of super heroes too. They're a great example of characters we praise for not changing in certain ways (their morals). They can change in other ways (they become stronger, or more humble), but not in their morals.
Paddington is another example of a character who doesn't change but rather changes those around him, and those movies were loved by critics.
Yeah, it's irritating when nuanced discussion gets thrown out in favor of clubbing someone with "the right way to write". I think the one which gets on my nerves the most is show don't tell. It has some truth to it, but people usually misapply it, imo.
It's funny, but the way I started doubting a lot of the simplistic cliche rules was by reading actual literature, where those rules are broken all the time. Even modern authors like Terry Pratchett break them (he tells a lot, and he also shows).
I have a theory that a lot of popular opinion on how to write is based on film analysis. (for instance, explanations of show don't tell treat the narrator like a literal camera).
I've never seen Akagi, but it sounds familiar. That it works so well while breaking a "rule" lends credence to the idea there are no rules, or perhaps that the rules are something else entirely. I'm not sure which it is.
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too many of the rules seem like personal preferences, and those writers only know how to teach others to write exactly as they do.
this is relevant, someone criticizing The Elements of Style and showing how the authors don't really understand their own rules. I was gonna write a blogpost just to link this, but couldn't think of anything interesting to add.....
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Sorry for another delay! Egads.
You don't need anything interesting to add, the article is good enough on its own :D I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I've never read The Elements of Style, but I've heard about it for years, and I've certainly heard a lot of its rules. You can tell Pullum enjoyed thrashing it.
You should definitely link it in a blog sometime.
Exactly, or the kind of writing they enjoy reading. I only ever had one professor who taught us in terms of specific styles, and not "here's good writing, period." It was "here's this style done well, here's it done bad. These are the functions it serves. Here's another style."
There is good writing and bad writing--even objectively I believe--but it's within the boundary of a style, or a set of conditions. Most bad writing I think is a style done badly.