#atkara

I mean I don't know how we could know it. But maybe we could have done something different with the planet. It does not want to be with luvic.

Thanks for asking! There are a lot of characters in the book, some of whom I think are less important than others, so a full list would be very long (I have never seen anyone give a full list of characters in the book, let alone any kind of analysis of them). Here's a short one, from the section "Fic summaries" in my copy, that I'll have to edit when I get back to the computer:

(There are a lot of these – my copy is an early draft – so I can't promise that all of these have gotten better or worse over time, but there are certainly some that have.)

The character with the largest number of appearances in this draft (and presumably the final one), but still not the biggest role in that role is Aroush "Halapsian." He is a very good diplomat and a very patient man. He will often act as a sort of emotional intermediary between Casanova and Tishanev, trying to get them to see that they must not hurt each other, and generally acting to keep things from coming to a boiling point.

Tishanev is the book's villain, who is very close to Casanova but very much a monster. I should think that would be a pretty easy character to dislike in a short fic, but it took a long time to dislike him. He is a very intelligent monster, and at the beginning of the book I tried to make him intelligent but also a very childish person, like in the book "The Child in the House," which I thought was a good book. When I got back to the computer I realized I had misunderstood the character's intelligence and that he was much too smart to be that childish, but I still had a kind of complicated mental image in my head, and his "childlike" qualities only made that image creepier.

Then there is Tishanev, which is a person who was once a good person but has become a monster, except not in a "well actually" way, but in a "I was raised a monster" sort of way. There's more to this character than just his transformation. He has been in the process of growing into his new life and being happy for a long time, and there are people who think that he's really become a better person and have to stop him, and there are people who don't think he's better and who would love to see him finally reach a "happy ending," but they don't really know how to help him. This character has a very long arc – he has a certain amount of "growth" in one of the book's most interesting plotlines, but I'm also sure that I have more to say about the character when I get to his part.