In the first season, we met Jeanette Turner ( Chiara Aurelia) and Kate Wallis ( Olivia Holt), whose lives were forever changed after the latter was kidnapped by their school’s new assistant principal. We still know Tiana’s mother loves her and wants the best for her, but her mother’s thoughts/desires are not revealed to us.Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Cruel Summer Season 2.Freeform’s anthology series Cruel Summer follows the stories of two girls whose lives are woven together by tragic circumstances. Her interactions with Tiana actually reveal more about Tiana than her mother. Her mother is a great character but we do not see much of her. In contrast, a flat character would have to be Tiana’ mother. We can easily identify this because we can see how complex Tiana’s overall character is.

We’re able to see her inner thoughts, with lots of variety. An example of a round character would have to be Tiana from the Princess and the Frog. I believe I even learned about flat and “round characters when I was in grade school.

I think this metaphor helps me explain what I would use to identify a flat character and it also gave me a new way of thinking about how to identify them. I love that Forster includes on the first page “One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in-recognized by the reader’s emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name.” I really like the distinction of the “visual” and “emotional” eye. I would think flat characters are simple and, like Forster said, easy to identify.

Regarding round characters, phrases like “they have already been defined by implication and no more need be said.” are helpful when I try to identify them on my own.

Honestly, I was not familiar with all of the examples Forster used but I was able to understand the majority of the point. I liked that Forster gave us examples throughout the text about different authors using “flat” and “round” characters. Forster, “Character” was insightful and pretty straightforward.

What is a flat character