Responding to me, Dana Shilling wrote:
- The characters: three-dimensional, believable, interesting, and fun
to attempt to psychoanalyze.
I dunno...sometimes I suspect that the fun of the attempts to psycho- analyze stems in large part from trying to add a second dimension (or even to project an image onto a blank canvas)....
Well, I sort of half-agree with this, actually. To me, the characters (and, yes, I'm thinking most particularly of Avon here, but the others as well) are like icebergs, or maybe a better analogy would be undersea mountains. The island peaks are interesting enough in themselves to make you want to explore them a bit, but once you start doing so, you realize that there must be a whole lot to them that you *can't* see directly, and that's where the fun and the element of projection comes in. You get to try and figure out what the bulk of the mountain must look like, in order for *this* peak to connect to *that* peak in this sort of a way... (To thoroughly abuse a metaphor...)