What is Character Bloat?

Question

Hi Guys I’m new,

I stumble this term “Character Bloat” when I learned that Furnace, a character from the Starved Sonic Creepypasta, was removed cuz “Character Bloat” and I don’t know what it means. I searched it, still don’t know it. I ask in Quora, still no answers. So, yeah, hope I get the answer so I can now sleep.

Thanks.

In: 0

Answer 1

The short answer is that bloat is when you have too much of something, and character bloat is when you have too many characters. Long answer below.

In storytelling, you only have so much space in your medium, be it words or panels on a page, or time on a screen. In some cases, this real estate is limited by how long your plot can carry the story forward. In other cases, you’re limited by the amount of time people can sit and watch a movie, or the number of episodes in a season. Whatever the case, you only have so much space in which to tell your story.

To contrast this, your story is made up of characters, and those characters each demand some portion of that real estate. You need to show each character enough so that audiences get to know them, and ideally, allow that character to go on a journey and grow as a person. The longer your work of fiction gets, the more characters you have room to introduce.

Character bloat is what happens when you introduce more characters than you have real estate, and can’t give each an adequate amount of time to shine. Removing one of these characters from your narrative will allow you to dedicate more screentime to the characters who remain.

Books can be whatever length and tend to be less limiting than other mediums, so this phenomenon is most easily observed when comparing books to their film or tv adaptations. Cutting Peeves from Harry Potter is a great example most people will recognize. To my knowledge, the term is gaining awareness as a direct result of A Game of Thrones, which ended up confusing a lot of people in its early seasons from the sheer size of the cast. As the show went on, they omitted some characters, consolidated others, and didn’t replace many who were killed off, so later seasons had fewer characters who each enjoyed more screentime.