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A good work balances characters and story so that they reinforce each other instead of somehow "competing" of the "main point status" of the series. True character development requires the characters ending up in situations, more complex the better, no character attains much depth by simply sitting and talking, no matter how extensively or of how various subjects. Actions speak louder than words. That's why I fail to see how so many people consider LotGH for instance having better developed characters than Death Note for instance. What we see in LotGH is a lot of people sitting and talking about a lot of stuff, but very few of them actually end up in situations that would change them, challenge the way they were before, morally, interpersonally, emotionally, cognitively. And how a character changes, what s/he becomes in a given situation also tells us things about how s/he was before that could otherwise be left unstated. Reuenthal is about the only character in LotGH that ends up in a really complex, conflicting situation that changes and challenges him. In Death Note we see a lot of very subltle nuances in each character since the situations in the series are complex and constantly changing. A lot of them may seem "rigid" but something has caused that rigidness and something keeps it up. That's something to think about while watchind similar series that may seem "shallow" on surface. What people see as "depth" or "awesome characters" generally is just the opposite: characters talking endlessly about things that do not involve themselves psychologically in any way. It tells us NOTHING of what kind of persons they are, so it cannot be considered character development, unless it intertwines with some aspects of the story. Not to say some level of chitchat/meaningless dialogue not required for them to be realistic. It is. Everyone does that, so it adds to the overall realism of the series, but not to the characters themselves.
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