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@karthmin

Wow, I’ve been insanely busy lately. 😐 School’s been crazy, and I have a three-page essay to write, but I’ll spare a bit of time to type up my incredibly long reply.

I have a bit of a grudge with transformation arcs, in part due to the fact that they’re decently common, and sometime the author will put a character through unimaginable horror and…. nothing happens. They just bounce back. I know I’ve gone on and on about this before, but I really hate it when an author doesn’t take the time to look into things outside the standard “We have no hope, but this person who’s probably the MC just has this incredibly unbreakable(or dense) spirit, so we’re all going to follow a 16-year-old to the ends of the earth.”

Yeah. It’s about as dumb as it sounds.

There are times when something like that can work(the Chronicles of Narnia, for example), but if you’re attempting to write a fantasy novel like me that is undoubtedly fantasy, but is still pretty down to earth when it comes to characters and power levels… that’s not really the way to go. (Bear with me, this ties into my point. It just takes me a while to get there.)

The problem I usually have with transformation arcs, is that they’re usually a transformation of ability. MC has this super rare ability in the beginning, but is just learning to hone it. He trains for a little while, beats up some little-bad-guys, then goes to take out the big-bad-guy and gets beaten to a pulp. Then either directly on the battlefield, or a few weeks later after some mystical guru has come to train him, he defeats the big-bad-guy with an immense(and unimaginable) display of power because…. the power of friendship? Weird, non-typical training routines? An accident?

And yeah, a group of friends cheering you on from the sidelines is great…. but it’s not going to unlock mystical-power-level 100 so you can go smash some dark lord. That’s not how it works, and not how it should work, in my opinion. (At least, that shouldn’t be the general rubric.)

My MC, Kirin, has type of transformation arc, but it’s more like a transformation of believing one CMP to another at the end like you explained above. His “transformation arc” is more of having a decent moral compass(considering he knows what cruel people are like, I’d like to think he’d try to not become like them) and a bit of guidance in the beginning, but not knowing, say, the difference between justice and revenge. When you think about it, the lines should be pretty clear – but from an insider’s perspective, they’re not. No one’s wholly unbiased, so it’s often very hard to take a step back and see the whole picture.

The point is, Kirin has to go from believing some morally accepted truths that are right by humanity’s eyes, to going to believing what God ordains as “morally true”. It’s like the difference between… equality or freedom in man’s eyes and in God’s eyes. In man’s eyes, freedom is doing whatever you like. In God’s eyes, I’d say it’s more like having the freedom to do whatever is good and righteous, and doing those things. So Kirin’s arc is more of going from seeing things from a non-Christian POV to a Christian POV, I suppose.

And why does this matter to the plot? Well, the plot is tied to Kirin. It’s a character-drive plot, so if he makes a bad mistake–things are going to suffer from that. And Kirin’s morals are something that are questionable at times, but deep down pretty solid. From a worldly perspective. And we’ve got to change that, if we all want to make it to the end of the book alive–because if Kirin’s morals are off, then his whole worldview if off. People see a lot of things that are totally and completely unacceptable to God as acceptable to them–so even if Kirin seems to be an upstanding person by humanities eyes, he could be on the lowest of lows in God’s eyes. Think about it–we live in a society that views the aspects of a fallen nation–the killing of the young and old and the unwanted–as something perfectly alright. Is that not sickening? If Kirin lived in our world in this time period, he would be the person that many view as a moral person–but not a Christian(not that all Christians are perfect in their moral views, but I’d hope we have a little more of a grip on things than others.). So he’s perfectly susceptible to believing the same sickening “truths”(or if we’re going on post-modernism, an “acceptable thing”, but not a truth, since there are no truths to them.) as anyone else.

And that is why his transformation arc is so important. If he doesn’t have it, then he’s not going to make the right decisions. He can’t, literally because he can’t see what is the right decision. And the underlying theme of the novel will suffer also, because if you don’t have some basis of true and God-ordained morals in there somewhere, then you might as well just leave out all morals.

And that is my opinion. It long and discursive, but it gets to the point eventually. Glad you made it through. XD