Ohio 8th Grade English Language Arts (ELA) OST Practice Test

Characters who play the central roles in a story—those who drive the plot and shape the conflict—are major characters. The protagonist is the main character whose goals guide what happens, and the antagonist creates obstacles that oppose those goals, forming the core clash of the narrative. Because they are central to the action and receive more development, more scenes, and more attention than others, they fit the idea of major characters. Minor characters, in contrast, Support the plot without the same level of focus. Dynamic versus flat describes how a character changes, not how important they are to the story, so those terms don’t define the relationship to the plot the way major versus minor does. So the protagonists and antagonists are best understood as major characters.