What Is A Round Character? Explanation, Examples, and How To Make One!

What is a Round Character?

When someone mentions a round character, they refer to a character’s complexity. A rounded character consists of multiple dimensions, not spatially, but regarding their personality and actions. That means that a round character likely has many complexities and can undergo personal growth.

Writing your OCs to be round characters can go a long way toward making them appealing. Not every character needs to be round, but generally, your focal characters benefit greatly from the extra attention.

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Why Round Characters Are Important

A round character is appealing to readers and audiences for many reasons. Firstly, round characters carry sufficient depth that allows readers or audiences to understand them differently. For example, a rounded character in a story might be explored through things like their history, thoughts, traits, and emotions.

Round characters are also appealing because they are often easier to connect with. Humans are complex and contradictory, and a rounded character often exhibits a similar nature, which helps someone to understand them better, even if the features that make them a rounded character are not inherently likable.

Rounded characters, by their nature of being more complex than flat characters and prone to growth, tend to make great protagonists and primary characters. Part of great storytelling is about following a character as they change throughout a story. Giving them sufficient depth through round characterization is the way to go toward making a great character and writing a great description.

Tips on Creating Round Characters

While there are so many ways to give a character depth, there are a few common strategies employed by storytellers for centuries. If these strategies are good enough for Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolfe, and Stephen King, then surely they can help any creator maximize the depth of their OCs. Here are some round character types you can integrate into your own work.

The Contrasting Personality

When you think about it, everyday people are full of interesting contradictions that make them unique individuals. Often these contradictions are what endear them to us, or give us pause. Taking a character and giving them a contrasting element of their personality can be a great way to make a character more dynamic. If you want to make these contrasts even more effective, you can even make these contradictions thematically significant.

When working with contradictions, they can also be negative or positive. It all comes down to the type of round character you are creating. For example, a sympathetic villain can be established by giving them some kind of kindness that they practice when nobody is looking. You can also write a brave adventurer who has a significant personality flaw, resulting in a richer character overall.

The film The Godfather provides an interesting contrast through the criminal leader Vito Corleone. Despite his role as a Mafia don, he exhibits several moments of kindness that seem to contrast with the type of person we would assume he is. Most iconic is the presence of this organized crime figurehead lovingly stroking a pet cat as he listens to an assassination request. This small moment of rounded characterization was something that actor Marlon Brando improvised on set. 

The Changing Personality

It is hard to think of an example of a person who was born with a singular personality and maintained the personality until the end. Most people change their views and upset established patterns in their lives several times. Perhaps they are associated with events and milestones, but often they may just be a result of aging. People evolve, and strong characters should evolve as well.

Tying a character’s growth (or lack thereof) can be handled as part of a story, especially if they are the protagonist. This even works for non-protagonists too. For example, a wandering warrior, fed up with years of battle and hardship may retire to a lie of solitude and live a hermetic life.

You could also go another way and have a character’s lack of growth give them depth. Despite new opportunities arriving, the character may reject them. Their lack of growth then becomes an element of their complexity. Most of us probably know people who may be unwilling to make a change, and that unwillingness, for better or worse, makes them complex.

A great example of a protagonist whose personality changes in their story, unfortunately for the worse, is Walter White from Breaking Bad. When the series begins, he is a reserved, put-upon chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer. By the end of the series, he has become a hardened drug kingpin. The revelation, though, is that those decaying morals reveal who Walter White was already inside. Looking to media you love to inform what you write is a great tip when you need inspiration.

The Conflicted Personality

Conflict drives a lot of human growth and action. Centuries of wars, persecution, and exodus throughout history have shown as much. But more of interest is the smaller battles, the conflicts that characters contend with in their lives that inform their personalities. These conflicts go a long way toward making an audience feel something about a character.

Character conflicts can be internal or external. In the case of an internal conflict, they may be wrestling with a possible change, or doing something that may bring them trouble. The choice to disrupt one’s comfortable existence is always a great source of conflict.

External conflicts can help define a character and provide them with contrasts, conflict, and growth. A character may be forced to adapt to a new experience or lose everything.

Bilbo Baggins of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a great example of a character with a situation that works as internal and external conflict. The internal conflict for Biblo before he joins the adventure with Gandalf and Thorin Oakenshield’s party is one of comfort: Hobbits live comfortable lives, and joining a party of dwarves to retake a mountain is far from cozy for a Hobbit. Meanwhile, the external conflict for Bilbo begins as he sets out, how will the journey change him, or will it even change who Biblo is, fundamentally? All of this can be addressed in his character arc.

Step-By-Step Round Characterization

Rounding characters can be a time-consuming process as you try to tie their characterization to the storytelling you are trying to do. When developing a round character, consider this checklist:

• 🔲Figure out their basics: Think of them as a real individual and consider all the small things that make a person, down to appearance, attitudes, and experiences.

• 🔲Develop their background: Consider the character’s attitude, personality, and position, and take time to think about events that led them there. If the change is dramatic between how they were and how they are now, then figuring out those triggers is vital. You may never reveal them, but it helps to inform their writing.

• 🔲Give them conflict(s): A dynamic character requires conflict to shine. When developing your OC, think about the struggles they will need to face, internally and externally. The way they deal with these problems can be illuminating and make them all the more appealing.

• 🔲Explore their motivation(s): Figure out what drives your character forward. This can be several things. They may have a long-term motivation, but stories are often full of smaller moments where new motivations develop. Taking the time to consider what drives a character forward is always time well spent.

• 🔲Give them people to bounce off of: Characters rarely work in a vacuum (though that is not impossible). Characters tend to be most interesting and revealing when they are working off of other characters, be they friends, lovers, rivals, or enemies. Giving your character other characters to interact with can go a long way toward making them a more rounded character.

Take advantage of these steps when filling out your character description on CharacterHub - don’t keep your hard work buried in your notes.

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Round Character Examples

Want some examples of rounded characters from different media? Well, we have put together a list of rounded characters in literature, anime, movies, and more to help inspire you. These are characters who I find interesting due to their complexity.

If you were to ask me for an example of a rounded anime character, my first answer would always be Amuro Ray from Mobile Suit Gundam. Aside from the historical significance of the character to anime and how robot anime was forever changed, the character is quite compelling. When you get down to it, Amuro was just a child conscripted into war and had to learn about taking lives and coping with those actions. His further life, explored later along the timeline of the series, turns him into one of the most iconic characters in anime as he struggles between the need to counter his rival Char and developing his ethos of fostering understanding between people..

On the manga front, I can’t help but consider Piccolo from the larger DragonBall series as a great example of a rounded character. Originally a rival to series protagonist Goku, Piccolo becomes a steadfast ally, and maybe even friend, to Goku, even going as far as raising Goku’s son Gohan for periods. All the while Piccolo maintains an overall aura of antagonism toward Goku, making him a complex character. Elements of his character design also change with his alignment with the protagonists, so keep in mind design elements can help explore a character’s development.

Comics has any number of citable examples of rounded characters, but I think X-Men’s Cyclops is my first pick. Scott Summers, codenamed Cyclops, is the leader of the X-Men, and quite effective at it. The contrast of his life being a complete mess outside of that role makes him so compelling as a character. Scott is a messy character, prone to relationship trouble, rash decisions, and digging his heels in when he feels he is on the right side of an issue. Despite this, his leadership when the time calls for it is unquestionable. This series of contrasts does a lot to endear him to fans of the X-Men.

When looking for examples of round characters in literature, Frankenstein’s Monster is always a strong choice. Despite the inherent horror of their creation and the rejection of them by their creator, the Creature develops into a complex character. The Monster ends up being simultaneously sympathetic in their purpose, but repulsive in their actions. People can’t help but feel conflicted about the character for centuries.

In gaming, the power of narrative has grown, and interesting, well-rounded characters have emerged more and more frequently. A great example of one of these characters is Isaac Clarke, the protagonist of the horror game Dead Space. Without spoiling any plot elements, we’ll just say that Isaac is a competent, everyman character in over his head with a pretty tenuous grasp on reality, which makes the game's horror all the more compelling. He proves to be a well-rounded character in crisis both internal and external.

Futurama’s Phillip J. Fry is another well-rounded character, known for being hilariously dim, but having a striking depth and sweetness that helps sell his relationship with his co-worker Leela to the audience. Many of the show’s most striking and emotionally effective moments revolve around Fry, a testament to his well-roundedness for a guy who describes ideas as “headaches… with pictures.”

Video: https://youtu.be/vrmFA5aHg7Y?si=e4D8qLzIlwOQ-FpL

Richard "Richie" Jerimovich is a character who has taken TV audiences by storm in the FX dramedy The Bear. Richie is very much a fan favorite thanks to the emotional complexity of the character who is initially rough around the edges and easily described by most as a loud-mouthed jerk. However, his trajectory and search for purpose across three seasons of the show, and the revelation of and grappling with his flaws. The character is so compelling that seeing him belt out Taylor Swift at the top of his lungs in the car is a highlight of the show for many fans, as it reflects his growth and finding a reason to improve his life.

Video: https://youtu.be/HweVkp-dCsE?si=RxREY_JJZckpOH5z

These Characters Get A-Round

Figuring out a character’s backstory and elements of their personality that make them a round character is worth including in their profile on CharacterHub. You can reveal a lot about your character to a potential audience of other creators and gain insight through their questions and reactions. Features such as custom profile segments or social posts can let you hone in on elements that make your character unique and share them.