A Good Story Needs Good People (Both In and Out)

I’m no film connoisseur. I’ve watched movies, yeah, but I don’t understand lighting or casting or whatever. I don’t even have a Netflix subscription. But I have watched a Hbomberguy’s video essay on RWBY, so I think that definitely makes me qualify as an expert. I also understand a story, and how to craft one, and what makes it good.

That’s the whole point of a movie, I think. Or the whole point of a book, or a tale, or a Twitter Post, any sort of media. You want to invoke thought and emotions. A paraphrasing of what Hbomberguy once said, a show isn’t made perfect by its animation, or its original idea, or its setting. Things like that certainly help, but they’re meant to support the storytelling itself. You can have a cool fight with flashing lights and all that, but if you don’t have any story connecting the fight, or no one cares about the fight, then you don’t really have the fight, either.

So what makes the storytelling part of a movie good? Well, you can consider the different parts of it: You have things like exposition, characterization, etc. You have things like the plot or the acting. I think those things all pale in comparison to what I consider the most significant, however.

I think what drives storytelling the most is the characters and their relationships with each other. Let me lay it out.

The concept of characters is already super important to a plot, of course. You need your characters to carry out the story in the first place. Without characters (unless you’re the literal god of storytelling), you don’t have a story at all. But characters need to be good and interesting for you to have a good story.

Take Hbomberguy’s critique of RWBY, for instance. One of the biggest flaws of the show is the characters themselves and how they really aren’t that interesting. They’re really just people with fancy weaponry without any interesting personality traits whatsoever. Plus, every time a potentially interesting trait is introduced, it’s quickly quashed under the mountain of writing mistakes or efforts to further the plot.

You need characters that are interesting enough for everyone to actually care about what happens to them. You need engrossing backstories and motives, and actions that make sense.

That’s not it, either. If you have characters, there are bound to be realistic relationships. There are going to be people who like each other and people who don’t. And if someone’s opinion of someone else changes, you need good reasoning for that, too.

You need turmoil and chaos and pettiness. People are going to create pandemonium no matter what happens. You need care and sympathy. You can’t have yin without yang. You can’t have, say, a character suddenly become nicer with no context, or have a character save a bully from a monster and suddenly they’re best friends, or have a character make a joke at the end of a season about your own bad characterization! That was, of course, in no way related to a perhaps aforementioned show named “RWBY” that I’ve already brought up three times in this article.

Anyway, yes. If you want a good story, you need good characters for such a story. Don’t have seventy scenes where the characters accomplish nothing and do nothing of interest.

So go ahead.

Make us interested.