When you want to update the ages of your characters, there could be a time skip. If you don’t want to do that, you could also update the characters’ ages and make it a retroactive change through the entire story. Retroactive changes aren’t always recommended but they’re a lot faster and easier than starting over entirely.
These options have their pros and cons. With a time skip you may need to think over how other characters changed since then, but it could also help you with the other changes you want to make.
When I started my story I expected that it’d focus a lot on the school setting when the main characters weren’t in battle, but I ended up drifting away from it,
I had more ideas for how characters could be interacting with each other and what they’d do in their spare time that’s not just school.
What do you see your characters doing and how they’d interact with each other without a school setting?
You could also make chapters with character POVs moving forward. I don’t think you’d need to start over for that.
I started over on my story before. It has a lot of changes to characters and expanded on their backstories more, but I started over mainly because the previous version had fundamental problems with the pacing that couldn’t be fixed any other way. It was too fast in some areas and too slow in others that it was a bad combination.
