How To Tell If Your Character Is Useless

(Made with Perchance)

Sometimes, you put a character in a story and think they are essential, only for them to be useless to the story. We have done it several times before. Maybe you made too many characters and wanted all of them to be in the story, but you don’t know how to make all of them relevant. Maybe you want a character to be in the story, but you don’t know where to put them. Regardless, there are several ways to know if a character is useless to the story.

First, I want to say that a character isn’t useless because they are hated. As much as people want to sit there and say that characters like Sakura Haruno are useless to the story, she is anything but. While her character was annoying, especially as a child, a lot of Naruto wouldn’t be what it is without her. Naruto wouldn’t be alive without her, and now the character Sarada from Boruto wouldn’t be here without her. Without her, Naruto would be very different, not just in how she affected the characters of Naruto, Sasuke, Kakashi, and more, but also in her role in the story.

Now, here are three ways to know that your character is useless:

The story would be the same without them.

If I am able to take that character and pluck them out of the story and nothing changes with them gone, then they are useless. Even if they are minor characters, they should have some sort of relevance, especially if they are paraded as important characters. For instance, in the anime Demon Slayer, while Rengoku is a minor character, his character arc, story, family, and death are integral to the story. It would be very different in the later parts if it weren’t for Rengoku and his death. There are characters where, if you take them out of the story, it doesn’t change at all. Like in My Hero Academia. Honestly, some of Class 1-A can easily be replaced, such as Rikido Sato. Honestly, even in the scenes that he is in, he can be replaced. Not much changes if you take him out of the story, yet he is in one of the top classes — Class 1-A. If the characters are so pointless that they can be swapped with another character or taken out of the story with little to no change, then yes, they are useless. This does not apply to background characters or characters only meant for a singular purpose.

The character is only there for one aspect.

A lot of the time when I talk about this, many people automatically think of a love interest in a show or book, but no. While it’s true that some love interests are just made to be a love interest and nothing else, sometimes that is their purpose. I’m talking about a character that is only meant to forward the plot, or we only see them to encourage the main character, and then we never see them again. The character is only there to provide something and has no personality. These are the characters that we are supposed to believe are important because they stand next to the main character, but in reality, it makes no difference if they are there or not. When it comes to these types of characters, they are so cookie-cutter and replaceable that they are basically the shop owner NPC from video games. They are only there for the main character to buy something, and then they leave. The only time you see them is when the main character has to go to them. These can sometimes be the non-super or non-special best friend who has no role other than to tell us information about the main character that the author wants the audience to know.

The character has no purpose.

Every character is supposed to have a purpose. Whether they are the local slob or the mayor of the city, every character needs to have a reason for being there. For a character to be there without any reason shows the author’s incompetence. For example, let’s say you have a group of four. One is the main character, one is the main character’s best friend, another is the smart character, and the last is just a tag-along. Nothing ever comes from that tag-along. There is no big reveal, no dialogue, nothing that contributes to the story, not even an ounce of personality. They are just there. It makes you wonder why they are even there. Why have a group of four when the fourth person is doing nothing but tagging along, and by the end of the story, they are how they started: just there? Not every character needs to have agency or some sort of huge reveal, but there should be some reason why the character is there. These types of characters tend to fall into the first category, too, so they can be taken out of the story with no change.

Every character in the story needs to have agency, even the tiny-role characters, because that character has to mean something. While it’s true that you may be able to replace a character that the main character helped, like a little boy, a little girl, or some older person, the role of that character never changed, which is to be helped by that character. Even tiny roles like those can say a lot about your character. For example, what if they didn’t help them? They would be seen as an evil or jerk character. Or what about a little girl that they decided to tease? Yeah, the little girl may be easy to replace, but the role isn’t because it’s integral to the main character’s, well, character. But this is mainly about the characters that we are supposed to think are important but aren’t. The ones that appear so frequently yet add nothing to the story. Making characters isn’t easy, and making sure they fit smoothly into the story can be difficult as well, but it’s better to ensure they are necessary rather than a waste of time.