User blog:TotalShamablamaWhatever/Giving Characters Another Dimension

Character interaction? Character ignoring more like! It's the odd duck in this series. It's the little child no one wants to play with but adknowledges it once in a while, you know kind of like my social life growing up. **Sobs**

But however, a lot of people on this wiki believe that character devolopment comes from character interaction, which is true, but it doesn't rely on it soely. A table doesn't rely solely on one leg, but all four. Obviously. It's a horrid table otherwise. Character interaction is sort of the main part of character development in everyone's mind, but there is a major factor that everyone seems to ignore about character development: the environment and situations.

See character interaction totally works, I'm not saying it doesn't. But it's not the only string to your bow, the only song that made Vanilla Ice famous. There are other ways to grow your characters

Therefore, my major argument that TD needs in order to create incredible character development is to Take the one dimensional characters and put them into situations or force them to face the environment that force them to go out of their archtype in order for them to grow.

Let me explain it another way. Red and Blue make purple right? and purple is more inteesting than red and blue, but red can mix with brown or magenta or cyan or morango or snot-green or something like that. Its not purple, but it is an interesting color and it isn't bland.

Gwen's character archetype was "the loner" you know what made her so interesting in Total Drama Island? She made friends and adapted. She grew as a character. Zoey turned from a nice, unathletic girl with no friends to a badass athletic commando in ROTI who was fed up with the show s***, and she turned that way because of the difficulties the show had on her.

Let me put it this way. Imagine if Cameron or Noah or Cody would look like if they were cornered by a bear and somehow fought it off, and gained new confidence in themselves. Imagine how Lightning would grow if he was attracted to someone that didn't find the cocky athletic selfish jock attractive, so he had to change and adapt? Imagine if Heather met a competitor that she couldn't force herself to vote off, because she liked them too much?

The best character arcs in my opinion are the ones where difficult environments or challenges force the character to tear off the conventions of their old life and adapt their personality and realize that their old stuff doesn't work. It turns one dimensional characters into two dimensional character, and then into three dimensions.

Unfortunately this might be a problem because the TD writers might be too busy distracted by shiny objects to understand this, so if you don't mind I'll be putting this into my fanfiction and hopefully you will too.

~Shama