A deed without a name?

I have the vague feeling I may have blogged about this before.

I'm plowing ahead through Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, getting into the late-series arcs that I expected to have a hard time taking seriously--and not having a hard time taking them seriously. I suppose I don't actually need to get into spoilers to make this point. Suffice it to say that the things that happen in later seasons sound pretty implausible based on what you know about the characters in the early seasons. They make sense because characters change over time.

Characters have to change if you want the story to be taken seriously, not least because people actually do change. (Of course if you want your story not to be taken seriously, characters who never evolve are a good way to do it. Take, for example, the legendary intransigents of Seinfeld.)

What strikes me about Buffy is that in later seasons the writers seem to be aware of the things that keep happening to the characters, and the characters internalize them. (If not all of the character change in Buffy is gradual or realistic, that's a separate issue.) In real life, if a person you knew kept having vampire-related relationship problems, you might realize over time that that person had issues with vampires and/or intimacy. Contrast with George Costanza of Seinfeld, who goes through 43 girlfriends in nine years yet is always understood to be bad at getting--not just keeping, but getting--women.

Of course the change isn't entirely organic, nor should it be. Plot demands that certain things happen, or else there is no plot. I've tried "letting the characters write the story" before, but when I started with realistic characters they did what real people usually do: try to write themselves boring stories. The truth I discovered, and that I'm observing now in a well-written TV show, is that if you want a story you need to make characters who will get into trouble--that is, get into stories. Of course you could take characters who know how to keep out of trouble and contrive to get them into trouble, and that will furnish you with a story. To get a second story out of characters with reasonable self-preservation instincts and life skills, you'll have to contrive to get them into trouble again, which can end up getting... contrived.

So, really, if you want to tell a lot of stories about the same characters getting into different kinds of trouble, you need them to be people who seek out trouble, or draw trouble to them.

Over a long enough timeline, to keep stories going, type A trouble-finders have to evolve into type B trouble-seekers. This would seem to be why long-running dramas seem to be about such severely screwed-up people. The people have to be, or the story runs dry as the sensible cast manages to get itself out of trouble and stays out.

It does make me feel sorry for the characters, though. I guess that's the idea.

I wonder if there is a term for this sort of directed character drift.