Brilliance. Among other things, Mark Twain wrote that the “rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction”

require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

and

require that the author shall say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

Quite fascinating—expecially the ones where the avatar is like an altered version of the original person, rather than entirely different.