Characters don't need arcs

Picture this. You've come into possession of a gripping story that has captured your curiosity. You start outlining a few characters, imagining them in the world where you story is set. Details are emerging as you work, flying through the planning process with the grace of an inertial bird in gale. Whilst building the presentation of your story, you entrust a draft to someone you know for appraisal. The feedback you receive is as follows:

"It's very good, but the protagonists don't develop at all."

You check through your work and realise they're right. The beliefs, attitudes and actions that your main characters express throughout the story are consistent. Too consistent, you think. Now, you feel you must dedicate time combing through the story, looking for ways that suggest there's been a change of outlook in your leading men. Whether you're successful or not in this endeavour, you feel as though the story would've been better, your persons unscathed.

Hold on. Let's address something with clarity. Character arcs are not just mere plot elements; something that is kept on a checklist that assures whether your story is any good. They are simply the culmination of introspective decisions your characters make. Consequently as a creator, you cannot miss the opportunity to reach understanding, especially to prevent a desire that forces internal development. Doing so will rob what is authentic about them, instead treating it like scrap thrown to the hounds. Rather, as creator, the focus should be to grasp a deep psychological perspective of their personality.

Comprehending the moral quandary

From your position as a creator, you know better about your story than your creations do. Why not consider exploring that disparity to the steep depths of their ignorance? Is it imperative that a lead learns the moral lesson your story deeds to impart? What if they already expressed an understanding of the moral lesson, before the story even began? How about a story where there is no clear lesson, yet the protagonist believes they learnt one anyway? These questions are not meant to be universal or conclusive, but I submit them to encourage a deeper deliberation on where characterisation can go. It is not necessary to give your characters an arc.

Take for instance the idea that storytelling encapsulates real human experience; an informal, yet personal anthropology. Do we need to learn the lessons we should, or think we should, from any given experience? Does every experience require us to learn something new? While our lives can only be witnessed from a first person perspective, we still have a complex interaction with ourselves and the outside realm (that is everything and everyone else). Our ideas are constantly challenged, yet it's entirely up to us and our disposition whether we adapt them to match, or not. Seeing as we, too, are real humans with real experiences, why not draw that familiar uncertainty into elements that make up our story? After all, this serves to strictly open up our options as a practitioner of storytelling. If we acknowledge this as a technique, which makes it an option for character development, but also recognise that characters define themselves, we learn another tool of the trade to employ as needed. To condense this concept into a bite-sized phrase:

"My characters say when they need to develop, if at all"

While we know what's best for our stories and characters even if only subconsciously, our characters have no possibility to understand. If we allow them the chance to dabble in ignorance, even to the final word, we can posit our hand in control of our stories. We should be able to selectively choose when our characters can't be broken, whether they're brittle, if they'll ever break and when they will bend. Alas! Take the character arc, put it in the technical toolbox, and freely apply when you see fit. Your characters certainly don't need it and if you're happier with it gone, your story will be better without it.