Characters as form and function
You thought this was a post on One Piece, but it was me, Dio!
Let me set the scene for you: Luffy must set sail to Marineford to save his older brother, Ace, who is about to be executed by the Marine. Aiding him is a bunch of newkama (new okama... LGBTs), the male members of the Baroque Works corporation (big LGBT if true) and the Whitebeard Pirates, to which Ace belongs. Opposing him is the entire force of marines. Will Luffy be able to save Ace? Will the world fall into disarray and war?
This is not a One Piece post, but it's inspired by it. (I’m still tagging this as a one piece post, lol) This is a post on theory. The craft. Because One Piece does something cool with its characters: it works them as a series of set-ups and payoffs. But to talk about this, let's discuss characters as function first.
Apologies for bringing out the word function so early. The whole "form and function" ideology is a foolish one, and anyone who still subscribes to that line of thought when it comes to storytelling per se needs to read "On Style" by Susan Sontag expeditiously and feel decimated by facts and logic. In brief, function is "the point" of the story, its argument, its use case in our society. Form is everything that serves this function. Says one blog, "function should dictate form". If you're writing the story of an 18-year old girl navigating high school, a diaristic form (first person point of view, written like a diary) might serve the story better than an omniscient point of view. A tweet I've recently come across goes a step further: if you write a novel, you should make use of the form, i.e, write in good prose. This is the multi-disciplinary, cross-media apex of it.
The trouble here, of course, is art isn't meant to "have a point". That's a very slippery slope you'd navigate yourself to. No story has a function, or, put another way, all art is style — someone's style. That's Sontag's argument. It's one I wholly agree with.
When we talk of writing like this, the trap is that it's talking of writing from the outside in, and the headache is when writers, who should know better, apply it as they're constructing the work. For that's what writing is - constructing, feeling your way into the narrative, the story, the characters, the voice. The style. So the natural question you as a writer could have reading this would be: am I not supposed to think of form and function? Get rid of that function nonsense. Other than that, yes, you will. You have to. Outlining is a prototype of the form your work will take, no? Or you don't outline, but in either case your writing is the form. The voice is the form. All is style.
As soon as I moved away from thinking my work needs to possess an argument, and started thinking of my characters as actual people with their own thoughts, opinions, etc., my writing has become stronger. It's not that my work doesn't have themes. It's that I don't impose them onto it, and stopped moralizing my work. Because that's what this is, right? A "function" in a story is, in the end, a way through which to judge a work based on how good/bad it is. (One Piece tried this with Tot Musica in the latest romp Film Red, you'll recall)
But it's possible to think of characters as having form and function. Their function: love interest, foe, protagonist, folly, parent, and so on and so forth. This isn't just their link to the protagonist(s) (the center of the story), but also work as a neat shorthand to their allegiances and how much pagetime they will get. I don't want to use the word "purpose" as a synonym for function here, because that goes to a necessary/unnecessary dichotomy I don't want to get into right now. Right now, though, I'll use it for one function in particular: the protagonist(s), whose purpose is to carry the reader and the narrative from point to point. In addition to that, the protagonist possesses a body, which the writer must be aware of1; and a voice. These two together complete the form2, and it goes without saying this applies to all the other characters within a work.
I wouldn't be the only person to have made the discovery of characters possessing form and have a function. I've recently started to follow LocalScriptMan's YouTube videos, and one of his big arguments is that characters are not people. Instead, they are vehicles for a perspective to a particular theme that fuels the conflict. All the same though, he's a big believer in Enneagram (Zodiac for nerds) (he defends this choice across a couple videos, yes) and MBTI (Zodiac for racists) and psychological concepts of wound and externalization. The problem is evident: if all characters are vehicles, why bother approximating them to human beings? (Rebecca F Kuang would not even bother to do it!) Why spend time thinking about dramatic storytelling if it's all clashes on argument against a dramatic question? Trusting Aaron Sorkin as definitive writer perspective? C'mon.3 They can be mostly function, if that's what the writer desires, but in that case, they need a very compelling form (voice) lest they end up nothing but a mouthpiece. The opposite, of course, all form and very little function4, also exists. In the case of possessing very little function, we as the reader think of characters as human beings.
For what I want to talk about here, the assumption is that the characters are, indeed, mostly function. I mean this literally: they do one thing. In a heist film, there'll be the leader, the conman, the dexterous one, the techie. In One Piece, there is the captain, the swordsman, the navigator. They have one function, and their character bends to it. The conman is a smooth talker, the techie will be socially awkward, you get the picture. In turn, the story will skew to the formulaic, one in which characters are so reduced to this component to such a degree that the dramatic question will be if these characters will succeed working together in their goal or not. Here, the characters are not human, no. They are cogs to a machine. And within this specific framing, I've come to realize that in addition to them possessing a function, you can use them like an object and apply Chevkov's Gun onto them.
One realm where characters possess a function at a time is the world of superpowered characters. For instance, in One Piece, a character who ends up traveling with Luffy in Marineford Arc is Mr. 3, who possesses wax powers. That means he is pretty good at creating keys that fit into locks. With a set-up like this, the payoff is, "He creates a key that fits into a lock that frees Ace". But before that happens, Oda adds so much chaos to the scene that it slips from your mind. Add a motivation for Mr. 3 to do this in the first place, and it's a bona fide moment that makes a satisfying pop. Nothing better than showing a character, hiding them, and then showing them at a crucial moment, so long as you can justify the character's disappearance (in the narrative, with their motivations) and reappearance. (I've written it, and yes, it was satisfying to write, too)
And Marineford arc is full of these little pops, a war arc functioning like a heist, and it's incredible how well it works especially near the end. But Oda knows when to bring the human aspect into it - when the function ceases and the characters become all form again, all voice, all human: for the finale, when a certain character exploits another character's sense of pride and love for others and leads him to his death. And, as if that was not enough, a third character appears — the final payoff5 — and his greed kills off a fourth character. It's brilliant! Oda has been chipping at that for a couple arcs, but never as well as here. The core is wholly dramatic — it’s about an auxiliary character’s life, not some random nation. That allows the machines to grind against one another.
It's interesting why I don't enjoy this as much when other action flicks do them. I suppose that the answer lies in the lack of form of the character. Instead of a satisfying payoff, it becomes convenience. The line is razor-thin. You can't rid of the voice, and you can't rid of the body/soul that brings a baseline of humanity to a character. It's what makes a character compelling. Always.
The writer needs to be aware of this. Whether they employ bodily functions or not, from headaches all the way down to stubbing the toe against something, is a choice. I also think, while writing about this, that there's a type of reader gregarious enough to fill in the blanks, i.e, think of the character as possessing a body if the writer so chooses to hint at it.
When it comes to forms that possess a visual component - a voiced visual novel, a TV show, a movie - the "voice + body = form" equivalent is pretty much summarized to one, which is the body. Unless there's a voiceover, in which case this distinction is as pronounced as it is in the body.
He’s like 21, so I cut him some slack.
Whether writing or reading, you can't ever erase a baseline function of a character - again, this goes back to the character being a parent, a love interest, etc. to the protagonist. You can try, though. Brandon Taylor's Real Life is an attempt at it, certainly. And all voice and no body (with the added constraint of little function) is what he was getting at in the character vapor essay.
We could say the third character's function is the chaos agent in this particular instance.