“Peak NPC” is the state an IP enters when it has mined its existing slate of characters for plots to the point where it has to start making nonsensical or irritatingly cliched choices, like every NPC in WoW eventually becoming a raid boss or Cortana being the villain in Halo 5.

“We need the audience to care about the next plot twist, so it has to involve a character they care about, and we don’t have many of those left. And we’re not confident in our ability to make a NEW character they’ll care about.”

Like Peak Oil, Peak NPC doesn’t mean the NPCs have run out. But it does mean you can see them running out from here.

Peak NPC can be avoided by concentrating on renewables, i.e. acknowledging that a long-running franchise will need character variety over time and constantly investing in sources of them. This does require gitting gud at introducing new characters who aren’t terrible, though.

This thread inspired by a discussion of whether Cortana’s role in Halo 5 is an example of a pattern in SF where rogue female-gendered AI are presented as threats that need eliminating; my answer is yes, KIND OF, but it’s not that simple. https://twitter.com/monicabyrne13/status/1330228629918408706

Peak NPC shows up a lot. If you’d told me when Halo 2 launched that there were going to be like 10 games with her as a main character and then asked if I thought she’d ever heel-turn, I’d have said “Oh, sure, if she’s been your ally for long enough it’s the obvious twist, innit?”

(Probably would have assumed it’d take more than five, though.)

That said, systemic problems are often reinforced by people with no intent to do so. Giving Halo players a naked AI waifu and then letting the series run forever puts the games at risk of reinforcing this harmful pattern unless it’s guarded against consciously.

Killing off characters for cheap drama is a reliable contributor to Peak NPC, and I think audience acknowledgement of this, if only subconsciously, is one of the reasons you see audiences object to cheap deaths. It’s not JUST attachment to a character who’s died…

…it’s what that death might indicate for the future arc of the narrative—especially the second or third time it happens. When storytellers start to burn through their resources, it means the things they can do with their remaining resources are about to get constrained.

I could probably develop a related concept, “Peak subplot” or maybe “Peak backstory,” to explain the thing that happened in the old GI Joe comics where every character’s backstory ended up tied to that car accident that killed Cobra Commander’s family and took Snake Eyes’ voice.