![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiBlake's 7 wrote itself into a corner a bit by introducing Anna as a very important (and very sympathetic) presence in Avon's life about a series/season before we actually meet her. I suspect that for every fan who cares about Avon's personal life and who saw the series unspoiled and in order, this created a more-or-less jarring experience of seeing the Anna they'd created in their minds exploded. I know that happened to me. To this day, I have two totally different visual images of Anna in my head (and somewhat different personalities) and have a hard time reconciling them into one person with one life history, despite 15-odd years of coming to terms with the Anna of "Rumours."
On a narrative level, Anna got shortchanged. She was introduced in a way that was guaranteed to make most fans ultimately disappointed in her/disillusioned by her, because we all prefer our own stories to others'. And when we did see the "real" Anna, we saw her so briefly and under such bad circumstances that we had no chance to replace our own shattered visions with another understanding of a fully developed character. We were just given a lot of complexity and confusion, and some arguably good and some definitely bad behavior, and then it was over. Nuts.
The moral of the story is be very careful when giving a big, dramatic introduction to a figure you're not actually going to have show up for a long time. The move is almost guaranteed to disappoint.
On a narrative level, Anna got shortchanged. She was introduced in a way that was guaranteed to make most fans ultimately disappointed in her/disillusioned by her, because we all prefer our own stories to others'. And when we did see the "real" Anna, we saw her so briefly and under such bad circumstances that we had no chance to replace our own shattered visions with another understanding of a fully developed character. We were just given a lot of complexity and confusion, and some arguably good and some definitely bad behavior, and then it was over. Nuts.
The moral of the story is be very careful when giving a big, dramatic introduction to a figure you're not actually going to have show up for a long time. The move is almost guaranteed to disappoint.
