Story Structure II: Character Arcs
Wherein I discuss the process by which I come up with, flesh out, and then develop characters. And also, wherein I discuss approximately twenty nine quintillion other things that are tangentially related.
Character writing in the context of an FE is such a fascinating concept that I can almost 100% guarantee that I’ll return to this topic at some point and discuss it from a different angle, but I’m going to try to be comprehensive here anyway. Between the problems with deployment (some units will have to go unused and will become more or less unusable relatively quickly), permadeath (most units can die at any time and become unavailable for further development), and the already scarce script budget of the FEGBA format (as discussed in the A press tutorial), giving your entire cast time in the spotlight is very, very difficult to do. Many players will use a unit for an entire game and never read a single support, talk event, or boss dialogue from them, their experience of the unit being wholly defined by that unit’s introductory dialogue. This means that despite having a cast of dozens, if not half a hundred, playable units, you’re only really likely to give significant character development to a small handful of them.
I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to tackle this topic initially, and I think that trying to tackle this thing from the top down is… ill-advised 
so instead, I’m gonna divide this into little sub-parts. You know, Story Structure II-i, II-ii… Like a textbook! 
Discussing the various types of characters that you have in the FE games, and the ways you have to handle them differently. Despite the ensemble nature of the FE games in a mechanical sense, you can’t really tackle the story telling in the same way an ensemble JRPG might, and so you sort of have to stratify your units to some degree.
Main Characters
As always, I’m going to use my own hack as an example, and as always, this isn’t because it’s the best possible example, but rather because it’s the only FE game where I can 100% say for sure what the intent behind every decision was. I’ll also be referring to other media, both FE and otherwise, to talk about the ways that characters can grow and change in both satisfying and dissatisfying ways, as a way to point to examples of the consequences of some of the schools of thought at play here.
Your main characters are, in this context, not just your lords, but any set of characters that are important to the plot in some kind of long-term way. Arbitrarily, I’m also going to say they aren’t antagonists, but only because I plan on discussing them separately – for examples of antagonist main characters, see your typical Zuko archetypes, your “redemption arc baddies.” We’re going to discuss how to have your characters grow and change throughout a plot in ways that are both purposeful and meaningful.
Your goal, when writing any kind of character arc, should be to try to reinforce the themes of your story – since Story Structure III doesn’t exist yet, we’ll just skim over how you establish the themes of your story in the first place and just describe it as the “moral” of the story. Your character arcs can also be used as ways to steer the plot. I start to run into a problem here; I’ve already stumbled over not having yet established the concept of themes, and now I’m already running into a situation where I have to explain things I wanted to touch on primarily in Synthesis. I’ll try to keep it to what we need to know right now:
While it’s not a hard and fast rule by any stretch of the imagination, your character arcs will be far more likely to fall flat if they’re something that develops in a fashion more or less separate from the rest of the facets of your script. If one of the main topics your game touches on is “family,” then a main character having a character arc about, say, “the nature of power” is gonna feel a bit disconnected. Similarly, if your major character moments are more or less totally disconnected from the plot, then both are going to feel less impactful – if your protagonist just had a life changing revelation, but the plot doesn’t react to this, it’ll feel wrong. If something occurs in the plot that should drastically alter your characters’ perception of the world, and then they’re right back to same old same old, the audience will start to believe that the plot doesn’t actually matter to the characters. If that’s the case, why should the audience care either?
When planning a character arc, you probably want to do it alongside the main plot. The low points of a character should coincide with low points in the plot, and the same is true for a high point. Not every ‘point’ in the plot needs to be a point for every character, but they should coincide. These points should be congruous with each other in some way – if much of a character’s arc is about them coming to grips with their past, then a plot event that evokes some of that trauma is prime real estate to bring them to the forefront for a time. If a character’s arc is about them feeling powerless, then perhaps when it’s time to triumphantly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, it should be that character who makes the decisive move. You can do this in the other direction too, of course – if one of your characters is undergoing a redemption arc, you should include moments in the main plot where that character has to make the choice to be better – giving them a plot where they’re always doing the right thing will make the redemption arc fall flat.
In my own hack, one of the biggest driving forces in the events of the main plot is Fane. Spoiler warning I suppose, although people have stopped respecting this as a spoiler for quite some time 
but at the end of the currently public build, Fane’s mentor is killed and he takes control of the player army in an official capacity. These pair of events kicks off a steady fall from grace, as Fane tries to grapple with a lot of very big questions while being, mentally and emotionally, in a very very dark place. When constructing this character arc and the various beats that happen in it, I was also keeping in mind what the main plot was intended to be – I wanted to tell a story about a lot of heavier subjects, like how war leads to radicalization which leads to more war, the act of othering, the way institutions can twist religion into a cudgel to suit their own needs. To determine how a character like Fane plays into these themes, I had to consider: Where does this story end? How does it get there? Just as importantly, how does Fane get there? And where does his story end? Where are these things different, and where are they the same? It’s in finding those similarities that much of the work is done; finding the points in your story where things are lining up, ‘clicking’ together like a jigsaw puzzle.
I like to look at writing almost more as a discovery than a creative process, like an archaeological dig – you set up your story, but when you start digging you start to find things you never planned for and never knew existed. Things start to just make sense, and it’s when they stop making sense and begin to come into conflict that your next step starts: modifying what you already have to where it makes sense. Maybe you intend to have a character, as part of their arc, do X thing – but, as you’ve developed the game, you’ve found they tie really nicely into Y theme, and now them doing X thing contradicts their newfound (and, in your opinion, far more valuable) role in the plot. Determining what you’ll replace X with to accomplish the same goals while still furthering Y theme, and doing this several times throughout the scripting process with all of your main characters. Don’t be afraid to change your plans or modify existing text in service of a more interesting ‘line of play.’ That is to say, if you come up with an idea that’s more interesting than what you had before, it’s worth it to put in the legwork to reconfigure the script to fit that idea 9 times out of 10. Even if it seems like a lot of work, it’ll be worth it in the end once you have every element of your story working in perfect harmony.
So to summarize: Main characters, those being the characters what drive the plot forward, should almost always have their character arcs be closely intertwined with the ups and downs of the plot arc(s), and should similarly be tied closely to the themes. To construct their arcs, it’s often best to picture things from the top down, looking at what you want that character to do in the story and where you want them to be at the end of the story and comparing these goals to the goals of your story as a whole, and then ‘zooming in’ to explore the similarities and differences between those goals, tweaking things where they start to feel like they don’t make sense and trying to leverage the moments where you feel things overlap or contrast in interesting and engaging ways.
Minor Characters
This is the weird part!
So, Fire Emblem games have several dozen minor characters in them that are more or less totally useless to the actual script. In this context, I’m gonna define that as “characters that aren’t important to the plot, but are recurring fixtures of the script in some capacity.” In an FE context, “the script” gets extended to “the game,” in that they stick around not as part of the storyline but as a gameplay element. Imagine the minor characters in a JRPG, or a TV show you like; chances are, even while markedly less important than the protagonists, they fulfill some kind of tangible auxiliary role, even just “being comic relief.” The Biggs and Wedges of the world may not be necessary for the plot to function, but their presence still helps to oil the hinges, so to speak, and make sure things run smoothly.
However, this is less so for the Darts and Gonzalezes (Gonzali?) of the world. Despite having the potential to be the one that strikes the decisive killing blow against the ultimate evil of the world, these characters have next to no impact on the script in any tangible way. Despite this, due to the gameplay constraints of Fire Emblem, they can be made important enough by the player to be present for the most pivotal battles of their world. As a writer, this leads to a strange situation – there’s an impulse, at first, to try to develop every character in your cast; to have them all contribute in dialogue, having different characters show up across various dialogue scenes. However, it doesn’t take long to get mired in conditional hell, and it pretty quickly becomes more or less unfeasible.
Real quick, I’d like to highlight the romhack Deity Device as an example of a writing approach that works very well for that game, and that I’m also going to discourage DD chooses to keep its cast size dramatically low, far smaller even than FE8 – I would say the closest analogue in cast size is Three Houses. However, where 3H struggles to give most of its supporting cast things to do besides stand in a semi circle around Byleth and spout one-liners, most of DD’s characters have extensive time in the spotlight. They’re involved in the main events of the plot, have entire gaidens dedicated to developing them, have story moments that result in them changing as people. More than any other SRPG I’ve ever played, Deity Device nails the ensemble cast feel, though to a degree it comes at the expense of a few core FE tenets – with such a focused cast, there’s very little room to customize your team, even on a replay; ironman is definitely not intended with how few deaths it would take before you started to really run low on worthwhile units; losing even one or two units can bar you from pretty huge chunks of storytelling, which is very unfortunate if you’re invested and want to see everything; but despite all that, the storytelling benefits are plain to see, as by the end of the game, damn near every unit you have deployed has had a detailed story arc unfold, and you feel much closer to them all for that reason. This is all to say, you can make a game where every character is well developed and shares time in the spotlight… it’s just really really hard, comes with significant sacrifices, and starts to feel like not-FE very very quickly.
Creating a character arc for minor characters, then, is very, very hard to do. It’s also, if we’re being entirely candid, completely optional – your gruff sword mercenary that’s only in it for the cash can remain that way all the way from chapter 1 to endgame if you so wish, and nobody’s going to bat an eye so long as they aren’t a permanent fixture of the main story. Your options for giving these characters are pretty limited – you can do gaidens like Vision Quest or 3H, which gives specific members of the cast gaidens devoted to them that are more or less totally disconnected from the main plot; you could have some fancy character-specific events like in Genealogy; but for the most part, your bread and butter tactics for developing the various units in the army will be simple talk events and their support chains.
Supports are time consuming. You may be able to picture in your head how time consuming supports are, but I guarantee you it’s two or three times as time consuming as that. Finding conversations for dozens of characters to have with each other, each one needing to be meaty enough to remain interesting and engaging for three full dialogue scenes, each one being significant enough that it doesn’t feel like a waste of time to read them all, each one feeling unique and exploring a new facet of both characters involved, and then just the sheer time spent writing it all out, it’s a lot of work. How unfortunate, then, that supports are by far the most effective tool at developing your minor characters!
So, I’m gonna do a tutorial on writing supports in detail, bc it’s like… a big process… but for now, let’s assume you just know how to write a good support in a vacuum, or that you’ll read the support tutorial in a timely enough fashion to retain all the info. Just knowing how to write a good support is only half the battle – making those supports matter to the game being played is the next step. While its support system has… several problems, I’m going to gloss over them for a moment: In 3H, one of the greatest strengths of the game’s script is how often the supports loop back in on the main themes that the plot and worldbuilding are trying to push. Often, the discussions that unfold in the supports touch on things that really matter to the world at large – they discuss problems that arise due to the reverence that crests garner; they discuss the stark class divide; in Blue Lions, they discuss the primary events that will prove to be instrumental to Dimitri’s arc later in the game. The things you’re reading about in the supports will later come into the main plot and be important, or at the very least feel important, and it leads to a very strong sense of cohesion between the themes, the world, and the characters that holds up right until the plot starts to derail. (Please, by the way, don’t respond to this post by telling me that the 3H supports are bad or that the characters are one note or whatever else. I understand that, it’s just not relevant.)
By making your supports particularly topical, so to speak, you can create a similar sense of cohesion. Your characters, after all, are experiencing the main plot just as you are, even if they’re not in any of the scenes. Why wouldn’t they, too, be contemplating some of the same things the protagonists are? Why wouldn’t they, too, have strong opinions about the pivotal events that lead to your plot’s inciting incident? In my own project, many of the characters will discuss the same themes that Fane is grappling with, providing a variety of alternate perspectives on the topic. By the time you’ve read your fair share of the supports, you’ll have a vast well of opinions to draw from in coming to your own conclusions alongside Fane and the other protagonists, and by understanding those conclusions in context, you can draw a greater degree of significance and meaning from them all.
But how does this relate to the arcs of those minor characters that are doing the talking? A savvy reader may already notice what’s going on here – it’s just like before. You’re mapping these characters onto the same wavelength as your plot, as your themes, as your main characters. This time it’s softer – you can’t pace it out quite as well, though talk events can be used to give specific insights on specific chapters, so you’re not aligning the pace of these arcs with the pace of the main plot. Instead, it’s more of the general shape – “where are these characters going, and why, and how?” are all questions that are answered in part by those same questions we asked when trying to determine Fane’s character arc. In much the same way as Joshua and L’Arachel mirror the arcs of Eirika and Ephraim (on paper, at least, since FE8 isn’t well written enough to actually have functioning character arcs), but simply live out those arcs on a smaller scale, your characters can do much the same on an even smaller scale by ruminating on the topics that are most important to them in their supports, with their A support (which, for our purposes, we’ll assume is going to be limited to only one, as that’s the FEGBA standard) acting as a character’s final statement on those topics.
That’s not to say every character in your project has to be compartmentalizing the exact same traumas In most plots, you’ll have multiple arcs to draw from. I’ve been using Fane as a central example, but of course in my project there’s other major characters, such as Ileana, Maeve, Raphael, Lionel, and even some characters that haven’t been introduced yet like Pouri, not to mention the villains! Several of their arcs are intended to intersect and overlap, but each is still a distinct entity, and several characters are more closely aligned with one than the others and thus tend to map onto those character’s arcs more concretely. There’s also the various themes of the game, each of which is of varying importance to the various protagonists – the questions of faith don’t matter much to Fane and Raphael, but are of vital importance to Ileana and Maeve, for instance, and many characters find themselves discussing several of the themes, even multiple at the same time.
There are, of course, methods to have more control over these character moments – talk conversations, as we mentioned before, are a great way to make sure your minor characters progress their arcs when you want them to, since most A supports can be theoretically reached ~3 chapters after a unit joins unless a chapter has a hard turn limit. There’s also base conversations, or support systems that progress on a map-by-map basis rather than turn-by-turn, like in Tellius or Vision Quest. Think about what solutions work best for you; a more structured approach will lean itself more to characters that grow in structured and fixed ways, while the looser approach as seen in FEGBA leads to a more free-form kind of development that you may find feels more natural and easier to keep track of.
To summarize: supporting characters can’t really be afforded the same kind of screentime as your main characters due to the structure of an FE game. For that reason, their arcs, when they have one, tend to be contained to their supports and a few optional (and often easily missed) side events, like a talk conversation or something similar. Because of this looser structure, the way you build their arcs should be similarly loose – rather than mapping it directly onto the rhythm of the main plot, these arcs should instead be more about providing tangible growth for the character while broadening the player’s understanding of the primary arcs and themes of the game.
Antagonists
Yeah fuck you we’re not done here. Time to talk about my favourite topic: bad, dangerous men that are just no good for you 
Okay, okay, this one’s gonna be a much shorter section, don’t you worry. Now, first and foremost: Your villains don’t always need an arc, but in my opinion for them to be compelling they always need to at least have had one. A villain can be static throughout the entire game, and often they are, but understanding who the villain is and how they became the way they are can shine a light on the underbelly of a lot of the themes you’ve been playing with. Say your protagonist is a young prince attempting to prove himself in the wake of the death of his father – in other words, Ephraim. If your primary antagonist did much the same many years ago, but decided to prove himself by, uh, being evil, then you can use that framework to explore some of the ways that NotEphraim has faltered in his journey, the ways he can do better, and to highlight his eventual overcoming of those trials and being better than his evil no-good counterpart. This is a very basic way to handle it, but sometimes that’s okay; your villain doesn’t need to be the centrepiece of your entire plot. Sometimes, your story just needs a bad man to hit who represents all that the protagonist opposes most!
Of course, there are tons of ways you can handle villains in ways that tie into the themes and character arcs of your game. One of my favourite games for illustrating the power of strong theming in the villains is the new God of War. Nearly every single character in that game, in some way, comes from a broken family, and their arcs either involve them mending the rift in that family, or else failing to. Both the minor and major villains do the things they do due to their relationship to their family – to prove themselves to their parents, or to spite them, or to outdo their siblings, or even to kill their families. The protagonists, as well, are constantly grappling with their role as a family – a father trying to do better by his son, a son who wants to prove himself to his father and doesn’t know how, and both are only caught up in this mess due to their quest to scatter the ashes of the mother. It’s easy to see the number of ways that the protagonists, whose relationship is so strained, could go astray – the ways Kratos’s attempts to teach his son could turn him into a monster, the ways Atreus’s attempts to find himself now that his mother is gone are coloured by the people that they meet for both good and ill. They’re easy to see, because everywhere you go you see characters that are living through, or have lived through, or even have died from, these same sorts of situations.
So by this point, you get the drill: often, the easiest way to build your villains is to look at the protagonists and their role in the plot first and foremost. Unlike the previous two categories, though, and the reason why I didn’t want to just fold antagonists into a prior category, it’s much harder to get good results by just trying to trace a similar trajectory but just, like, evil-like. Instead, it’s more about understanding what those elements mean for the story, and creating a villain to suit it. Sometimes, this means creating a villain that represents a twisted reflection of the messages of the game – a protagonist that has to contend with the consequences of following his strict sense of honour who then faces off against an antagonist whose idea of what honour entails pushes him to do horrible things, bringing the differences and similarities between their beliefs into stark focus. Other times, it may mean creating a villain who’s anti-thetical to the protagonists – that same honourable protagonist goes up against a man who believes that a code of honour holds one back, as foolish idealism. It may even mean a villain that is instead just an honest reflection of the protagonist – Mr. Honour must face a man just as honourable, in much the same way, but who serves an opposing cause and, despite their mutual respect, must cross blades with his peer. In this way, whatever villainy is seen in this villain isn’t just an example of a path that the protagonist could have gone down, but rather is a condemnation of the protagonist himself, as that same capacity for villainy is shown to exist within him. And of course, sometimes you just need a moustache twirler – a big boisterous evil guy we love to hate, whose death we can cheer for without reservations. It can be fun!
So in conclusion, your antagonists are best served as some kind of foil to the protagonist, or an elaboration on the themes of your game when taken to their worst interpretations… and… um… I think that’s finally it?
All Done Time!
I… didn’t expect it to take this long. There’s so much I didn’t even touch on, things that I mentioned in passing or that I never mentioned at all so I could touch on them later in more detail. I really hope that this was helpful in some way – You’ve noticed perhaps that I’ve been talking a looooot about themes in this one. That’s gonna be what we talk about next: how to establish, develop, examine, recontextualize, and execute on a theme.
Even more than previous tutorials, please if you have any feedback on this one, let me know – this one is huge, and I’ve been writing it for like three days now, my eyes glaze over when I try to go over it to edit it, but I do want to make sure it’s as informative as possible. If there are things you feel I didn’t go into enough detail on, or things you feel I glossed over or that you think I should have mentioned, or if you think I could have explained something better, speak up! I’ll edit the post to make it the best I possibly can.
I promise the wait between parts II and III won’t be so long this time – I was swamped with FEE3 work.