WARNING, WARNING ... my previously threatened 'how Avon's changes in costume reflects his state of mind' argument is in here somewhere <veg>
Ann Basart wrote: <Which of the main characters change most over time? How? Why?>
Well, Cally does go from highly-strung, intense, 'companions-for-my-death' guerilla fighter to righteous ersatz earth-mother, but that, methinks, has more to do with Bad Writer Syndrome than character development (or maybe she saw Dayna's youthful bloodthirstiness as too close to what *she* had been, and didn't like it)
Jenna doesn't change a lot (she gets less to do, true) but I think there is a notable change - the woman who didn't believe in dreams 'but would like to' would not IMO have sent that message to Servalan in Star One, believing even as she did so that it *was* a betrayal of Blake (she didn't know he'd come to the same conclusion).
I agree with Betty's: <I think Avon in particular changes a lot. Watch a first-season epsiode and a fourth-season episode back-to-back, and it's impossible not to notice the contrast.>
Absolutely. The greater harshness of his voice and manners in the later episodes is rather too striking to miss.
Buts it's more than that, he changes earlier, and it's a combination of different things. Look at the very contained, stiff, ultra-reserved, consciously deliberate Avon in early S1 - his drab choice of clothes, his unconsciousness of his sex appeal (The Web), his more reserved body language. That changes quite a lot over the season (certainly the latter has by by Duel :-)) and by late S1/early S2 he's getting more comfortable about *physical* closeness (if not mental or emotional), blossom sartorially from computer geek into peacock with blaster (that silver jacket), and burnish the hard, glittering edges to his personality and style - both visual and vocal (theese edges, of course, get rather more sharp and savage as the strain of the Star One arc gets worse).
And that's just *before* things all start going really wrong for the dear man *after* Star One :-)
Back to Ann: <Are these real developments in character, or are we simply shown different (and perhaps surprising) aspects of a given person at different times? (As in the Servalan/Tarrant "Girl-next-door" exchange in "Sand.")>
Well, the only way I can stomach 'Sand' - *especially* that nauseating flirty scene - is by assuming that the love dirt not only affected their emotions and hormones, it did seriously nasty things to their brains as well.
But Vila's an interesting case in this question - the 'sudden' appearance of the adult, grimmer, slightly menacing Vila in 'Gold' can be jarring, but if one recalls, the potential *was* always there, in his very first scenes in 'The Way Back'.
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