The problem is that nearly every good piece of literature has a believable and relatable story arc.
So incompetent hack writers with no life experience invoke it as some sort of mantra to try to paper over the fact that they're incompetent hack writers.
The canon of high literature tends to feature arcs, but it's not necessarily a common trait. Picaresque stories, which are episodic and of the "here we go again" variety have been around for thousands of years. Think pulp heroes: Conan, Elric, the Three Musketeers. Things happen to them, there may be continuity between stories, the character may even change significantly over the corpus, but a coherent "arc" is non-existent or something accidental, that you have to squint to see.
The idealization of "character arcs" ruined popular fiction.
The problem is that nearly every good piece of literature has a believable and relatable story arc.
So incompetent hack writers with no life experience invoke it as some sort of mantra to try to paper over the fact that they're incompetent hack writers.
The canon of high literature tends to feature arcs, but it's not necessarily a common trait. Picaresque stories, which are episodic and of the "here we go again" variety have been around for thousands of years. Think pulp heroes: Conan, Elric, the Three Musketeers. Things happen to them, there may be continuity between stories, the character may even change significantly over the corpus, but a coherent "arc" is non-existent or something accidental, that you have to squint to see.