Neil wrote:
A death is a death is a death. Who killed whom is immaterial. What makes Avon so special? What makes Blake so special? Avon killed plenty of other people through the course of the series. Come to think of it, so did Blake.
There is a difference, though, between killing someone who is an enemy and someone who is (or has been) your friend. Or comrade-in-arms, even, if you don't like to think of Avon and Blake as friends. Emotionally, there's a difference, and even someone who's fairly cold-blooded (as I think Avon generally is) about killing strangers and enemies is going to feel differently about killing someone with whom he's had a close relationship (whatever you percieve the nature of that relationship as being). Morally, you could argue that killing someone who is supposed to be your friend makes the action even worse: the crime of betrayal is added to the crime of murder. And Avon, in my reading of the character, is someone who is capable of carrying a lot of guilt over betrying someone or otherwise fatally letting them down (which seems to be the way he reacted to what he thought had happened with Anna).
Things fell apart in catastrophically short order, and someone previously assumed to be a friend or at least ally (for all the sardonic gibes previously aimed at him) suddenly appeared in the guise of an enemy who seemed incapable of offering a coherent explanation for himself. Avon was thrown onto the defensive, and with a gun forced into his hands by immediately preceding events it should come as no great surprise that he defended himself the way he did. It was a gut reaction permitted by circumstance and opportunity. Not, by any means, the only action he could have made, nor necessarily the best, but the imperative to act overrode consideration of other possibilities. The decision to shoot was, I think, both conscious and deliberate, but in his mind he was not shooting the Blake he had known in the past and had hoped to find again, but a stranger who had, albeit unwittingly, turned everything upside down amid chaotic and stressful circumstances.
I just wanted to say that, sentimental character-junkie that I am, this paragraph made me get all sniffly.
-- Betty Ragan ** bragan@nrao.edu ** http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~bragan Not speaking for my employers, officially or otherwise. "Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions..." -- Isaac Asimov