the.com/character arc

means The transformation a character undergoes across a story, tracking how their beliefs, values, or circumstances shift from beginning to end.

from A 20th-century term from storytelling and screenwriting, borrowing 'arc' from its geometric sense of a curved trajectory — like the path of a thrown object, rising, peaking, and landing somewhere new. Screenwriters and story theorists adopted it to describe change as a visible shape rather than a vague notion, making it easy to plot on paper: where the character starts, where they bend, where they land. Its popularity grew alongside modern screenwriting craft guides in the mid-to-late 1900s, though the underlying idea — that characters should change — is as old as drama itself.