I want to make a moving symbol as a character without A: Redrawing the map for every movement, or B: Making the character copy itself. Does anyone know how to pull this off?

Drawing a character how? Either way, when using the console or graphics page to draw, you have to redraw the entire screen, since you'd be overlapping the old render with anything new otherwise, unless you can somehow only redraw the portion of the screen the re-renders were on. Another thing you could do is dedicate one graphic layer to the character, then a separate one for everything else.