“You know what’s weird about fleshing out characters in flashback?
We have typical high school students, and then they’re thrown into a pretty wild situation they’re totally unprepared for. But then we get their backstories, and I have to wonder whether the backstories matter?
When your school gets picked up and thrown onto another planet or whatever, do you, at some point, abandon aspects of your personality or identity? In other words, if you’re the uptight student council president, do you remain the uptight student council president, or do you YOLO that shit and just start, I don’t know, breaking everything made of glass you can find just for funsies?
The characters have to be sort of static when you tell the story this way, because we have to see them, get their flashback, and then, once we’ve seen the flashback, they’re able to change. But only after. If the change comes before the flashback, we won’t understand the change.
It creates a sort of artificial time bubble that preserves the character as very similar, at least until their backstory is spooled out. THEN they can change.
Why is writing stuff hard? “