When character development goes badly

Character development is usually a good thing. If a story progresses without the characters changing at all, at best it is frustrating, and at worst it means that the characters are just thin wrappers around an ideology the author wanted to express. Sometimes, however, character development goes badly. An example that comes to mind is in the 1Q84 series, where Aomame, a strong-willed and driven female character in the first two books, becomes a simpering dependent on Tengo, a male underappreciated author character, as soon as they meet up. It was such a radical shift in personality that I lost all interest in the book, and it was a struggle to finish it. Do you have any examples of character development which went, in your opinion, badly? How would you have liked it to go? Did I just miss something about 1Q84 book three?

It's been a while since I read it, but wasn't the whole thing that Aomame and Tengo were friends or in love long before and then lost contact?

That's why you should have a structure when you do a good story. You should not just start writing and then create characters on the go. Stop. Sit down. Create one character. Digit his/her gender, age, phonotype (including it's usual clothes and accessories), personality (could use MBTI for practicality). Then start writing it's story in a chronological order. Create a story with this character, even if it's a simple story. Do it for the other main characters. Get all the structures and do something like a mind map. Then, when you start the main story structure (would be good use a mind map too to set the plot, the rhetorical methods, the basic "monomyth" thing), you can just go and insert the characters structure inside the main story structure, so you have a very rich type of storytelling, not just a unorganized piece of soykaf.

>>195 They did know each other as children, and lost contact, but when they met up Aomame effectively reverted to a child. Her entire personality became about Tengo. The strong person present in the first two books was just... gone.

Loved the book, but the setting was definitely more interesting than the characters. My favorite of his is Norwegian Wood. The characters stagnate a little less (if that makes sense).

>>203 I saw it as the badass assassin version of Aomame being the world-with-two-moons one, and when she found Tengo, she reverted back to the regular-world version.

murakami? more like i-wish-i-was-houllebecq-but-im-not-that-cool-akami

>>122 I liked 1Q84 but I would never recommend it to anyone as their first Murakami. In the moment Aomame's character progression seemed sensible but her obsession with him was kinda off. Admittedly a more charitable view is a "true love never dies thing" but that's kinda corny compared to Murakami's storytelling. At the same time his influences tend western, which means the idea isn't unprecedented.

>>488 I have to ask --- what would you recommend as someone's first Murakami?

>>502 after the quake

The girl with the dragon tattoo. Namesake becomes yet another vector for the male author's sexual fantasies about half way through the book. Author should have just removed his all too obvious stand in from the book entirely.

>>502 Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or Norwegian Wood if you're a normal person who can't deal with magic realism.