The major characters drive the plot through its twists and turns and move the story forward. The major characters fill a variety roles (Phillips & Huntley, 1996, pp. 36-38):

  • Protagonist: The protagonist is the main character role in a story and drives the action. The protagonist will have a goal and undergoes a change – the “hero’s journey” – in the process of seeking to achieve that goal.
  • Antagonist: The character in the role of antagonist is in direct opposition to the protagonist. The antagonist may seek the same goal (e.g. find the significant object of the story) as the protagonist or may simply want to prevent the protagonist from achieving that goal.
  • Sidekick: The sidekick character role may be linked to the protagonist or antagonist. Each of those character roles may have their own sidekick. The sidekick character provides loyalty and support throughout the story and has unfailing faith in the rightness of the goals and actions of the protagonist or antagonist to which he/she is linked.
  • Guardian: The guardian character role is that of mentor or teacher to the protagonist. The guardian provides knowledge, guidance, support, and protection but also drives the protagonist to achieving the protagonist’s goal.
  • Skeptic: The skeptic character role is linked to the protagonist, but this character’s role is to question and doubt everything – the protagonist’s thoughts, emotions and actions, the trustworthiness of other characters, anything and everything.
  • Emotion: The emotion character role is linked to the protagonist and re-sponds to story events emotionally without thinking and without concern for the practical implications of an emotional response.
  • Reason: The reason character role is linked to the protagonist and re-sponds to events in the narrative logically, while not letting emotion in-terfere with the rational.
  • Temptation: The temptation character role is not necessarily directly op-posed to the protagonist, but rather tries to hinder, divert, and delude the protagonist from achieving his/her goal, often by tempting and playing on the weaknesses of the protagonist.

Characters can be used to extend the transmedia storyworld, but how that is done differs depending on the category of character roles. Walk-on/placeholder characters, for example, should be developed as a class of character rather than an individual character. Minor characters could go either way – remaining as they are or expanding into major characters in their own right. Numerous television spinoffs, for example, have taken minor characters and put them into their own story where they became major characters. Major characters should be fully developed as individuals, providing detailed descriptions, back-story, and other aspects of the character.

Information about characters can be introduced using Web or blog pages with “About Me” type sections that provide back-story on the character; e-mails, tweets, Face-book wall posts, and similar messages that provide character information; or online “dos-siers” that reveal information about as character as if collected by another party. These approaches are relatively shallow and provide little opportunity to understand the charac-ter’s motivations, values, desires, and fears. They provide the “first dimension”, showing the surface characteristics of the character (Brooks, 2011, pp. 63-68). The “second di-mension” of the character is the deeper issues and back-story that explain why you see what you see in the first dimension (Brooks, 2011, pp. 68-70). The “third dimension” of the character – the character arc – is how he/she deals with the inner demons to rise above himself/herself and the obstacles encountered in life (Brooks, 2011, pp. 70-74).