How Epic Fantasy Writes So Many Characters At Once

Added: 2026-06-08

[00:00:00]A Song of Ice and Fire has around 30 POV characters. That's characters who get chapters from their perspective.

[00:00:12]Stormlight Archives around 40. Wheel of Time around 120. Melazan an absurd 400.

[00:00:18]And like come on, how do these fantasy books do it? It's like juggling mice except all the mice have different magic systems and live on different continents. And who even deserves a POV?

[00:00:29]Like take Game of Thrones for example.

[00:00:31]You know, surely someone like Rob Stark, you know, the dude who leads the war against the Lannisters. Wrong. He doesn't get a POV. It's all told from the perspective of Catelyn Stark. And then whose POV should you start with?

[00:00:41]Well, with a story like this, there's only one answer. Obviously, it's Bran.

[00:00:44]>> And who has a better story than Bran the Broken?

[00:00:50]>> Anyone except Samuel Tarly. I know, hot take. But seriously, Game of Thrones does start with Bran. He's the first POV. Not Ned. Not John, not Daenerys, Bran. And like why? Well, I read it and the answer is George figured something out. He does something really interesting structurally with how he introduces his characters. All these POVs, something that worked so well that I really hadn't even noticed it before.

[00:01:13]It flew completely under my radar because Bran's chapter really isn't about introducing Bran. It's about introducing, of course, Ned. Bran's father sat solemnly on his horse, long brown hair stirring in the wind. His closely trimmed beard was shot with white, making him look older than his 35 years. He had a grim cast to his gray eyes this day, and he seemed not at all the man who would sit before the fire in the evening and talk softly of the age of heroes and the children of the forest. He had taken off father's face, Bran thought, and dawned the face of Lord Stark of Winterfell. The story is told through Bran's eyes here, but most of it is occupied with him observing his father. Ned executes the deserter. Ned talks to Bran about what it means to be brave. Ned examines the wolf mother's corpse. Ned allows his kids to keep the direwolves. Bran is a very passive character in his own first chapter. Ned is the active character. In my previous video on character intros, I talk about plot hooks which make us interested in what's going to happen next and character hooks which make us interested in following this character specifically. And honestly, most of the character hooks in Bran's opening chapter are for Ned. Yes, we come to see Bran's innocence and his intelligence, but it's really only through the lens of what we learn about Ned and his sense of honor, his maturity. And in that way, it's a double whammy. Baboom, right?

[00:02:30]Like, and George keeps doing this with his chapters. Like, let me do a diagram.

[00:02:35]So, before we get a POV chapter from Ned, we get introduced to him through POV chapters from Bran and Catelyn.

[00:02:40]Before we get a POV chapter from Jon, we get introduced to him through a POV of Bran. Before we get a POV from Sansa, we meet her through the eyes of Arya and Jon. Before we get a POV from Tyrion, we meet him through the eyes of Jon. And these introductory pairings are very intentional. Tyrion and Jon are both outsiders. So, their introductory chapters give us insights into that core conflict and insecurity for the both of them. It's where we get the famous line, >> never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you. Likewise, Arya and Sansa are opposites, different ideals of femininity, people with whom natural conflict arises and whose conflict is key to both of their plots in the overall story. Ned being viewed through the eyes of others first matters because his role in the story is kind of to be the catalyst for change and decisions in others. It's his death which sets everyone off on their own journeys. It's Ned who everyone thinks back on throughout the series as it progresses.

[00:03:36]It's his moral code which motivates and changes how people think and act. He is the sun in a sense around which they orbit and without which they need to find themselves again. People make the mistake of thinking character introductions are really just about telling us who this character is like in isolation on their own. What they look like, their traits, their desires, their strengths, their weaknesses, their goals, their blind spots. But really good character inductions do a lot more than that. And this is especially the case in epic fantasy with these huge casts of characters which all have to interweave in different ways. The best intros help us understand the story that they are a part of. The dynamics which are key for the tension like Arya and Sansa. That's why they're introduced that way. Which traits set up and foreshadow later events. That's Daenerys being controlled by her brother and her desire for this smaller innocent life.

[00:04:25]Which problems the characters have and face connect with the themes of the story? That's Tyrion and Jon as outsiders. Consider which relationships and character dynamics are the most meaningful and use those to introduce multiple characters at once, chaining them off each other. Not only establishing them as people, but people who exist in relation to others and other points of tension, people they have tension with, people they bonded with, that they foil or symbolically reflect. Especially with epic fantasy, when you're not just introducing one character, you're introducing this web which has a bunch of people in it and how they intersect, how they check each other, how they bounce off each other.

[00:04:59]It's often more important than who they are individually. I think part of the reason he starts with Bran is it's hard to transition from a character like Ned who is super involved and active to a character like Bran who is a bit more passive. It feels like it can suddenly slow down the series unless you start from that passive perspective, but you frame it through that active character.

[00:05:20]What this chaining structure also does is it kind of makes that transition to other POVs a bit easier because you've kind of already met them in that sense.

[00:05:28]It feels easier to slip into them instead of getting that whiplash where you go, "Oh, okay. Suddenly I'm in someone else's perspective." This is Guardians of the Moon, the first book in the now infamous Malazan Book of the Fallen series. While regarded as one of the best fantasy series ever written, and also one which has an absurd 400 POV characters. It doesn't work for everyone. I don't even know if it works for me, but Erikson does do something really interesting with how he juggles this many POV. He can't chain them off as easily as a Game of Thrones and you can't really treat each POV character as like its own book the way you can with Brandon Sanderson. With so many POVs, it's hard to call anyone the main character of Melazan. But through that, it's almost like the story itself becomes the main character with each POV furthering it in some way. You have to sort of like let go of the need for a main character and instead follow the plot thread that connects them all in a bit more of a nebulous way. For example, there's an assassination attempt early on in the story of Gardens of the Moon, and Erikson uses this event to bounce between his characters who might otherwise never talk to each other, never have anything to do with each other, might not even meet in person, at least in this book. So, you get a chapter from the perspective of the assassin, then someone they meet during the attack, then a politician talking about the attack in the aftermath, then an Empire official asking whether the assassination worked, then a god-like character intervening to warn someone about what's going on with the assassinations, then a mage reflecting on why this assassination happened.

[00:06:56]Then, a soldier asking whether they're doomed in their current task because of it. And some of these perspectives are only a page, some barely a few paragraphs, with the story following the narrative threads and questions which pop up in the reader's head more so than the character choices which emerge out of them. The focus is on the event and its aftermath from a ton of different angles. And we're following the story of which they all play a part more than any of these individual people. He also writes it so that the POVs are often connected thematically so that even if you don't have consistent characters, each chapter evolves the themes of X, Y, or Zed. Like in Memories of Ice, there are these big themes of motherhood. So you keep getting these characters with weird and varied perspectives giving you different angles on what motherhood means, what it means to do without it, what sacrifice means. It's different, but it does kind of work if you let it, if you can tolerate it perhaps. The three-body problem also kind of does this. Not to the same extent. Doesn't have as many POVs, but the main character does sort of feel like the story. And as you move between the characters, that's really what you're focusing on. Now, epo fantasy is often criticized for being slowly paced, mind-bogglingly boring, and why don't you go touch some grass every once in a while? And that's not fair. I touch grass every time I go to the bookstore accidentally. Part of the reason I find getting into the wheel of time daunting is that everyone who loves these books tells me, "Okay, first book, ripoff of Lord of the Rings, but second and third book pretty damn good." Now, then there's the four book, 2 millionword slog, uh, and that is pretty hard. But then there's a book which is pretty good. And then there are two more books which you can probably skip. Then the best book you will ever read, then a bad book. And then the last three books are absolutely some of the best stuff ever written. And I'm like, I don't know if I can do that, man. What am I meant to do with that? Anyways, it might not look like it, but Game of Thrones is a remarkably fast-paced book.

[00:08:46]Like so fast that I just assume that the next book is coming out any day now.

[00:08:50]>> They ask you how you are, you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine. One of the reasons that I think it manages that multiple POV really well, especially in that early part, is the chapters are quite short.

[00:09:01]You never feel like you're sinking too hard into it, that you can't get out of it, but also, you know, that you're quickly going to get back to a story that you really, really love. And I think that really works in its favor.

[00:09:11]But it's also because all of these POVs are intentionally packed together in the same place for a large chunk of the book. You know, they all start out at Winterfell. The Lannisters come up north. All the Stark kids are there.

[00:09:21]Then a bunch of them go down to King's Landing and a lot happens at King's Landing. They really only scatter into their own stories when, spoilers, Ned dies. And that geographical limitation means Martin gets to focus on these characters and their decisions and how they interact instead of introducing 10 different locations and societies and casts all at once. This is, by the way, a tactic Lord of the Rings uses as well.

[00:09:42]It's only with the breaking of the Fellowship that they split into three different narratives. The Wheel of Time does this, too. This tactic is pretty common because it helps solve that pacing problem early on in epic fantasy book. But okay, not every character can be in the same place and you probably don't even want that for a big epic fantasy, right? So, how do you handle characters like Daenerys who are that whole continent away? Well, George R.

[00:10:03]Martin does do something pretty interesting with her as well. She is given chapter 3, chapter 11, chapters 23, 36, and 46, and then there's a cluster of Daenerys chapters at the end.

[00:10:14]And that structure is intentional. It means we get the time to fall in love with the core narrative thread which is kind of all around King's Landing and you know the conflict with the Lannisters all the characters really feeding into that and only once he's really proven that we can trust him with that story does he switch gears and focus on that expanded world. So it's not just a simple matter of switching between these characters 1 2 3 because they're all equally important. You know consider how you might allow the reader to focus more in one area and one story.

[00:10:39]Give them kind of a full beginning, middle and end and then open it up letting your reader into the world more broadly. Not that you have to do this.

[00:10:46]Something like Malazan certainly does not do this. In fact, it will leave you wondering where in the world you even are, but I want us to understand why these stories are structured the way they are and what we can learn from that. But I will admit it does irk me when I'm following a bunch of characters that I really, really like and then the second book comes out and suddenly half the book is taken up by these characters I don't know and don't care about. Like this was actually something that I ran into with Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife where the first book is all written from Lyra Balacqu's perspective.

[00:11:17]A fantastic character, one of the best child protagonists I think ever written.

[00:11:21]Then the second book, a lot of it is written from the perspective of this other guy called Will and he's just not as interesting. Not to mention the entire second book basically radically shifts where the story is and you have to eventually orient yourself that like oh it is technically connected to the first book but not as strongly as you would like. I don't think Philip Pullman's multip as well as he could have and this is why by the way when his D materials was adapted to its fantastic TV series they seem to recognize this too and made the great decision to parallel these POVs from the start. So we switch between Lara and Will from the beginning and so when they eventually converge it doesn't feel like an interruption but like they were always two sides of the same narrative growing together and it works so much better. So yeah, on the one hand allowing the reader to focus on sort of one perspective, one conflict and then expanding the world a bit more. I can get why you would do that. But at the same time, I think there's something to be said for seeding those perspectives all at the beginning. Like Daenerys doesn't have no chapters at the start.

[00:12:17]It's just that she's waited towards the end. And this is something I see a lot of people bring up with Malazan where they say that the 400 POVs, the constant switching, the backlash, the whiplash, not being able to sink into anyone, uh, they find that difficult. And as brilliant as it might be, it can be hard to sink into. Epic Fantasy has these huge casts with a ton of characters. And the major characters, well, they get all the time in the world to make their impression, to leave the reader feeling something. But minor characters, not so much. They might only get a chapter or two. They often don't have much of a character hook and they're not that attached to the plot hook, but you still want them to be interesting. As I think about how to make minor characters interesting in stories as big and wild and varied and expansive as this, I keep thinking about Elder Ring. These guys are functionally minor characters in the story with very few lines, little screen time, who die basically as soon as they're introduced, but they leave significant impressions. Ask someone who loves these games and everyone has a different favorite minor character.

[00:13:15]Basically, part of the reason is very simple. Aesthetics. Every character in Elden Ring looks incredibly distinct and memorable. And they've got incredibly creative designs. Look, this Eldrich skeleton dude, Melania's flower wings, the giant snake hydro Ricard, but even the very human ones like Ranala and Rani have very interesting looks to them, right? That makes them memorable and you can absolutely adapt that as a strategy.

[00:13:39]But it's also how much they pack into the little cinematic moments that we get with each of them. Like take God the Grafted. He has one line pleading for strength from a dead dragon before revealing his true grotesque form with all these extra body parts. This is someone yearning to be more powerful than he is. A wannabe heir to the throne, ashamed of his existence and envious of everyone above him who naturally was born into power. Or take Messma the Impaler, who is clearly confused about why he has to fight you, but he does whatever he's told. Ever the loyal and almost bored soldier of an endless, soulless fight. Always the warrior right to his death. Two things really work here. One, these minor characters feel real because Elder Ring doesn't go out of its way to explain everything. These characters speak and act and exist outside of us and what we know. You kind of have to piece it together. You've got to make an effort to fully get what they're referring to.

[00:14:34]That can be a bad thing if you go too far with it. But here, withholding a little bit about them makes us curious.

[00:14:40]It makes us feel like there's the life of them outside of us. But two, each minor character's introduction also fits into the broader narrative and thematic discussion. Think about what we talked about with Melazan where those multiple POVs fit into the theme of motherhood.

[00:14:55]Well, Elden Ring is all about this decaying world. It's about how power consumes and corrupts. About who should pick up the pieces and what it means to control one's destiny, whether a safe and orderly world requires dictatorial control or whether it requires absolute freedom. And every boss kind of gives a slightly different commentary on those themes. Like with Malazan, sometimes the story is the main character. Even if minor characters cannot be fully formed in your story in the way your major characters are, they can leave an impression by playing a role in that bigger thread in your narrative. You know, a new perspective they give something that challenges the main character that hopefully challenges the reader too. If a minor character forces a main character to change tactics or reflect even in a little way, and Elder Ring bosses definitely do that, it will leave an impression on them and hopefully on the reader. But I cannot make a video about multip fantasy without talking about what is probably my favorite minor character, my favorite major character, and my favorite POV, which is Terry Pratchett's death. Death appears in virtually every Discworld novel, sometimes with only one line, but Pratchet always makes you laugh or ponder with him. There's this moment where a guy is considering whether life is worth living and anything is good at all and death says cats. Cats are nice.

[00:16:23]Just a little thing like that that sometimes it's just the mundane joys that keep us holding on. It gets basically one or two scenes in that entire book, but you feel something coming out of them. I think one of the best ways to practice writing minor characters is to write short fiction, even just one page to see how much character you can fit into so few words.

[00:16:42]And it really gets you take a step back and realize how much you can do with a character who doesn't need like a massive story and a massive character arc and this whole cast of characters and huge big stakes all around them at all times, you know, because you can adapt those skills to one scene, one moment, even just a line, one POV. And on top of that, I'm going to recommend uh three short story collections. The first is uh Choy Young's Shoko Smile.

[00:17:08]This is a South Korean translated uh collection. It's really fantastic. Also really interesting insight in South Korean culture. Classic Titiang's Exhalation. Some great big ideas in that. You've got characters making big decisions, but inside small word counts.

[00:17:23]And of course, a catalog for the end of humanity. This is my short story collection, which does have a big story in it, but it's got a bunch of short stuff in there as well, like Constellations of Flesh, Bone, and Memory, which is only seven pages, but it's about this girl going into a really risky surgery where she's getting all these organs and body parts donated from other children across the galaxy. And it comes with gorgeous art. All the stories do. Or there's On the Beach of Forgotten Things, which is about a lighthouse keeper who lives on this beach where all the forgotten things of humanity wash up, and then a child does. And if you want to learn more, continue this discussion, then go pick up my onw writing and worldbuilding books, which, you know, they talk a lot about epic fantasy and sci-fi. I go into why these stories work and how they work, but also just writing stuff in general. Like this book has stuff on subtext and dialogue and show don't tell and what plot armor means and character deaths and dialogue.

[00:18:12]And this one has stuff on first person writing and positive arcs and handling fight scenes, foreshadowing, exposition, prologus. They've all got entirely different stuff, so you can get all three. But, uh, if you just want to get one, that's also okay, too. I reckon the third one is, uh, is the best. And I'm stoked with these because over 100,000 books of these have been sold. Like, it went way beyond my audience. And I I never anticipated that. So, thank you if you have. Uh, they really allow me to kind of the financial flexibility to do whatever I want and to make videos which are a bit more niche and not as flashy and and big and and fancy as maybe some other channels do. So, it really does mean a lot to me. I love epic fantasy. I love sci-fi, but I I love just understanding how and why stories work.

[00:18:54]Like, that is my number one passion.

[00:18:57]And, you know, you let me do that, you know. Cheers. Thank you so much, guys.

[00:19:00]Thank you to my patrons. If you want to join the community, be part of these discussions, then please do. That means a lot. All those links are down below.

[00:19:08]Stay nerdy and I'll see you in the future.