Another thought. I'm not sure, but it seems to me these flat-arc stories would work best told through an Objective POV, never going inside the protag's head. At least many of them—I haven't really tested the theory yet. In fact sometimes they're told through the perspective of an associate or an outside character, like the Sherlock Homes stories told by Dr. Watson, or The Great Gatsby by his neighbor. Surely Gatsby himself didn't experience a character arc? Or it was flat anyway. Do we ever see the inner workings of Mike Hammer's thoughts and feelings? I don't know, never read any of those kind of series, but it seems unlikely. I have read Doc Savage, and he's always a man of mystery. At most his associates ask him questions and he might give half-revealing answers while retaining the mystery until all is revealed at the end. Just cracked open The Hunger Games, and even though it's written first person present tense through Katniss' character, I didn't encounter any emotions or thoughts aside from some very basic planning and commenting on Prim's crying (this was after Katniss had volunteered to fight in the Games, but before she had been taken to The Capital). So I'd call it 1st person distant or objective. I've now checked The Three Investigators, Mystery of the Green Ghost. It's a mystery/adventure series with a group of grade school boys. 3rd person objective. I haven't even found one acting as a narrator or POV character yet, all the characters are treated objectively.
Character arc can be overrated. Characterization is critical--they have to be interesting/memorable--but the actual ladder of apotheosis can become tedious. Take Aliens for example. How many people left the theater saying, "You know, I'm really glad Ripley overcame her fears in the end." Sure, it happened and certainly attributed to the appeal of the movie/character, but it's not like Ripley's journey could have made up for mediocre story/execution. My whole view of character arc is that you need a little bit of it but don't obsess over it. If you can pull off a grandiose transformation, awesome. If not, well, 9 out 10 readers aren't going to care so long as the story is good.
Brandon Sanderson calls them iconic heroes or characters: , https://writingexcuses.com/tag/iconic-hero/ However, I think he's referring to people without room for further growth because they've completed their own character arcs in terms of internal growth and skills. From the characters mentioned above, Holmes, Bond and Conan would fit. Of course that doesn't mean that they don't have arcs without their characters really changing, such as Conan becoming a king later in his life. This video just calls them characters without arcs or characters with flat arcs: . It gives examples of characters who don't have amazing skills, such as Marty McFly and Paddington, and I don't think they'd count as Sanderson's iconic heroes. One of the comments there points out the terminology of dynamic versus static characters. It sounds to me as though there isn't a generally accepted term for these characters.
You know, Marty McFly is a perfect example of what we're talking about. Marty had a very flat arc in the first movie compared to his father, George. If you remember there was that little bit about his demotape and telling Jennifer something like, "What if they don't like it? I don't think I could deal with the rejection?" Then there's the line about "If you put your mind to it, you an accomplish anything." Simple, right? A clear obstacle and a clear path to victory. Instant character arc! Except Marty never takes ownership of that. George McFly takes the journey, overcomes his fear of rejection, starts putting his mind to shit, and alters his life story from that of a loser to a well-off, ass grabbing, Beamer pimping, published author. Marty? Doesn't really change much. Or learn anything. And we don't care... Back to the Future is one of the best stories every told. Period. Flash forward to the second and third movies. They don't have George's journey to augment the story anymore. So they gave Marty one. Suddenly, Marty had an issue with being goaded into doing stupid things when anybody called him "chicken." That was how he broke his hands and "gave up on his music," and how he got fired as an adult. Suddenly that became his obstacle to overcome, and by the end of the last movie, he's able to resist the chicken thing, doesn't break his hand, and (theoretically) creates a new timeline where he resists temptation, makes better decisions, and doesn't grow up to be a douchebag. Thing is, where was all that in first movie? We seen none of it in Marty's early characterization. They had to invent it nearly from whole cloth in order to write the sequels. Sure he's a bit of a hothead in the first movie, but we like Marty better when he's gleefully punching Biff in the face than we do when he's declaring, "Nobody calls me chicken, needles!" You can almost see the writers sitting around the table in the development stage, brainstorming what Marty's character arc should be.
That's one of the characters K M Weiland discusses in detail on her blog. He doesn't go through an arc himself, he's a flat-arc character who knows the truth everyone else is unaware of, and he ends up quite literally changing the world around him (rather than his inner world). This is often the way these characters work.
Here's the link to the blog post, amazing stuff! How to Write a Flat Character Arc, Pt. 1: The First Act
It's the flat/static RECURRING character that I'm trying to find a term for. I'm beginning to think a term doesn't actually exist. I'm quite surprised, as it's such a common storytelling tactic—to feature the same, unchanged character in many subsequent stories. Sometimes even their age doesn't change. (Is Miss Marple any older in her final story than she was in the first one? Doesn't seem to be.) I feel better, actually, because I was convinced it was my failing memory that was making it impossible for me to remember the proper term. Looks like it wasn't me after all.
I'm also surprised we don't learn about flat arcs from the beginning. Most books on writing deal only with the standard positive growth or change arc, as if that's all there is. I think for a name you could refer to them as genre series characters, though that's a bit clunky. I think they emerged from the pulps and penny dreadfuls. I believe those evolved into what today we call genre writing, at the far end of the spectrum from the literary, with mainstream (aka popular fiction) in between.
Looks like I was a ways off: Pulp fiction, as I see it, is pure fluff and entertainment. It is often poorly written, not as a matter of definition, but mostly because the authors of this style need to pop out a large number of words per month in order to make a living. Pulp is pretty much a subset of genre fiction, again, not as a matter of definition, but because it is easiest to write quickly if you follow a formula. To recap, genre fiction can be literary, but it can also be pulp. Genre fiction doesn’t tell us much about the quality of writing or redeeming characteristics or depth or content. Someone could spend a lifetime reading high-quality genre mysteries without encountering pulp. Source I need to dive in and understand this stuff better.
