What Is A Flat Character? Explanation, Examples, and How To Avoid It!

What is a Flat Character?

Flat characters are best defined as characters who do not have much in the way of internal changes. When considering internal changes, consider personal growth (or regression), or changing perspectives. Many great characters are beloved for changing due to their journeys or the events in their stories, resulting in rounded characters.

Flat characters rarely have a feeling of complexity or depth. A flat character is likely to remain fundamentally the same by the end of the story as they were at the beginning. While yes, circumstances such as tragedies can befall them, and they can be affected by events in the story, if there is little in the way of growth from them within, they remain flat. For example, a character may come into wealth by the end of the story, but if that wealth does not affect them internally, they remain a flat character.

Flat Characters and Flat Arcs

Something to consider is how we use the word “flat” here as there are a couple of ways it becomes associated with characters. For example, a character can be flat as far as depth goes, but they can also have a flat arc, which means they do not develop narratively.

These two ideas can be interchangeable at times, but both still deal with the complexity of a character. A character can have flat characterization, as in lacking depth, motivation, or contrast. A character can also have a flat arc where they lack development and a sense of progression. In either case, these can be problems with creating major characters such as protagonists and antagonists.

However, that isn’t always the case, flat characterization and flat arcs do have their uses.

Are Flat Characters Bad?

When developing a character, you might feel the impulse to make them rounded characters, but not every character needs to be full of depth. Flat characters have their purpose. Their arcs may be flat, but they are still compelling characters.

A flat character offers stability and can often serve as a point of focus or contrast in a given situation. For example, a heroic character who faces no doubts or internal crises may provide an interesting foil for a doubt-filled, complex lead character. Perhaps that flat character provokes a reaction from the rounded character and motivates them.

An irredeemable villainous character can often appear flat if they lack motivation, and sometimes a flat villain is necessary. Such villainous characters can create a more classical or legendary feel to certain stories.

Not every character needs to be a well-rounded, complex figure. That could be exhausting in a story where every character has layers, depths, and backstories that the audience must be aware of. Sure, answering those questions can be fun for an author, but how essential are they to a reader’s experience with an OC?  However, flat characters also can provide fundamental context about the world and provide the round characters with personalities and perspectives that may enhance or clash with their growth and perspective.

An entirely flat protagonist could be a hard sell, but flat characters can make for essential side characters.

Examples of Flat Characters

Flat characters, by the nature of not every character necessarily needing to be a rounded character, are plentiful

Flat Characters in Literature

Literature is full of beloved and iconic characters with no real developmental trajectory. They may have interesting traits but they may feature some combination of flat characterization or flat arcs. These characters remain fundamentally the same at the end of the story as where they began it. Here are three iconic literary characters who can be seen as flat.

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is undoubtedly one of the greatest detectives in all of fiction and a very compelling character, but if we look at the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we see that the character is remarkably flat.

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Holmes’s public domain adventures are not necessarily about him and his development. Holmes solves cases, maintaining his hyper-competent nature as a detective. While yes, he may have his vices, they do not give him particular depth as he doesn’t grapple with them substantially. Holmes is meant to be a genius intellect with some unusual traits that solve his cases, and that’s about it. But on that foundation, a literary icon was formed.

That is why many updates to the character give him more challenging internal crises to grapple with, take the BBC adaptation Sherlock, for example.

Miss Havisham

Moving from a protagonist like Sherlock Holmes who is a flat character, we have a flat antagonist character in the form of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Miss Havisham is fascinating because her character, even when her backstory is revealed, remains static. She has a single-minded pursuit of vengeance stemming from rejection and she is trapped in the past.

Though her interest is supposedly to protect Estella from rejection, like she once was, she is unable to move beyond her anger and frustration at the past and adapt accordingly. As a result, she does not change significantly in the narrative, which makes her a strong antagonist, She is still very much a flat character, but it works in her favor.

Tom Bombadil

Moving from primary characters to tertiary characters in a narrative, we have the enigma that is Tom Bombadil, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Tom Bombadil is a fascinating character who remains completely flat, which is pretty normal for side characters.

Tertiary characters tend to be more about widening a world creating contrasts or reinforcing the worldviews of the lead characters. As such, they do not need much in the way of complexity. With that said, Tom Bombadil is fascinating because he is a flat character of tremendous power and oddness that raises more questions in the story than he answers. He also does not factor much into the plot and represents themes that were better explored with rounded characters like Gandalf, so when it comes to adaptation he is usually dropped, such as in the case of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy.

Flat Characters in Movies

Many legendary films revolve around characters who do not fundamentally change. These are some examples of flat characters from iconic movies.

The Dude

The legendary Dude from The Big Lebowski is a great example of flat characterization in film that proves compelling and entertaining. The character is a master craft of writing and performance.

The Dude does not grow or change in the film. His quest is a simple one, and he gets dragged into more and more bizarre circumstances, but he does not end up particularly affected by them. He even ends up in a relationship and loses a friend to a heart attack, but remains fundamentally unaltered by the experience. 

Yet, despite this, his journey is hilarious as his laid-back personality is frequently at odds with the scheming and tension around him, but he somehow manages to stumble through it all. In this brilliant analysis, Zachary Zanatta goes into great detail about why he is such a compelling character. “The Dude abides,” indeed.

Forrest Gump

The iconic Forrest Gump, played by Tom Hanks in the movie of the same name, is another great example of a flat protagonist. The key element of the character is that the story is less about him and more about his effect on the world and people around him. Forrest does not change significantly, he remains the same, sweet, dim man with occasional flashes of insight as he lives through moment to moment of historical significance. Even the role of fatherhood, put on him by Jenny, does not fundamentally alter who he is. He remains Forrest Gump, through and through.

Ellen Ripley

Ellen Ripley is a character that has appeared in four films in the Alien series, and plays a different role in each, despite being a protagonist. In the original film, Ripley is a rounded character because of her shift from an antagonist and no-nonsense worker to the alien-fighting survivor she is best known for being. However, Aliens, the sequel, picks up with her in some unique circumstances, and the Ellen Ripley the film begins with remains largely the same as she does at the end.

Even the addition of a found child, who she takes in as a motherly role, does not fundamentally alter her perspective or character. The film establishes Ripley as a former mother early on, and those traits continue through to the end. She is not discovering motherhood as a potential role, just reawakening those impulses. Overall, though, she remains the same experienced, headstrong, survivor that she was at the beginning of the movie.

Link - The Flat, But Compelling Hero

It makes sense to take some time to look at one of the most beloved flat characters in the world and understand why their flat nature has endeared them to so many. The character in question is Link, the protagonist of the vast majority of games in The Legend of Zelda series.

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Link is an entirely flat character in each game. His journey fundamentally alters nothing about his worldview or traits. Sure, he may become more powerful through new skills or equipment, and his adventures are filled with tremendous setpieces that affect the world around him, but Link always remains Link. His character traits are pretty limited to some essentials: he is courageous and persists. That’s about it. Everything else is what the player attaches to him.

The flat nature of Link’s character, however, has meaning and purpose. Link is a player's avatar and players project their experiences onto him. It’s not about Link’s experiences - it is about the player’s experience. Further, the detachment from the internal motivation of views unique to Link helps him to maintain a mythic quality - quite literally making him a legend that people shape by how they experience and recount his adventure.

How Do I Make a More Rounded Character?

If you have come to this point and realized that your OC is unintentionally flat, or you want to give them a little more depth, then there are some tried and true strategies to employ. Developing a rounded character is a process, like creating an original character.

We’ve covered the process of making a rounded character pretty extensively in a blog post recently, so your best bet is to read through it. However, one thing to note about rounded characters is that they are often given depth by way of challenges and contradictions. These challenges and contradictions come in the form of internal and external conflicts that challenge the way the characters see the world or themselves. As a character is forced to confront these things, they develop depth as they must come to terms with their idealized self and who they are in action.

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Give Your Characters Depth on CharacterHub

Even flat characters deserve the spotlight. Just because a character may serve a tertiary role in the story and appear flat in the context of the narrative does not mean you cannot explore them in depth. CharacterHub character profile pages are fantastic for giving background to OCs who may have a limited role in a project but still occupy a lot of brain space. Whatever inspires their creation, such as backgrounds and relationships that you can’t get into in the story can easily be included on their profile page.