Thanks for the summary, but I think you missed my point.

My choice of POV rebounds on me and is such a strong lever that I try to
choose it very carefully.

My problem with most fanfics is that the writers rely too much on the
personalities of the established characters, as they see them.  When
this interpretation differs from my own, I'm suddenly dumped into a
confusing inconsistency, out of the blue.  (Why should he think that?)

First person, unreliable is natural.  This is how each of us will live
out our lives, never intruding into anybody else's thoughts.  By
choosing one character and sticking with them, I can show how this
character ticks, and if nobody else agrees with me, at least they can
see the logic behind my choices.

Best of all, since I never touch the thoughts of any other character, I
am forced to place all of their reactions into dialogue or action and
since I bring no pictures, I have to describe these.

Third person is natural for anime and manga.  The author is given a
window that they can move about the scene and it would be very
restrictive if this window was limited to one character's line of sight.

As an example, take "That Darn Cat" (Rumic World Trilogy, vol 3).  The
story is a first person narrative of the author's alleged experiences,
flowing in the margins around a manga story in which she appears in
almost every panel.  And even in this story, she does dive in once to
another character's (a cat's) thoughts once, when there is a point she
finds she cannot express in artwork. (The question answered is: "Why is
the cat lying there quietly, in one particular spot?"  And it would have
taken at least three panels to show this in action.)

If I was writing a screenplay, I hope I would be honest enough to put it
into script format from the start, so as not to waste too much of the
readers time.  (I find the presence of the "d" key on the home row to be
quite comforting somehow...)

	Henry J. Cobb	hcobb@slip.net          http://www.io.com/~hcobb