Avon's Character
Manner and Interaction
As indicated before, I am a strongly positive-Avon viewer. As such, I believe that Avon was basically a good man with some unfortunately bad characteristics. Meaning that Avon was a deeply flawed hero but a hero nonetheless.
Avon has a natural instinct to protect people, even at great risk to his own life. This is most often seen when he has to act quickly and does not have any time to reflect on his actions.
He has a strong conscience but this is also balanced by a strong survival instinct which, in the extremely hostile environment of the Federation, becomes a highly selfish and self-preserving characteristic. But because of his strong conscience, Avon, although he will struggle and deliberate, will indubitably do the right thing.
Avon, perhaps as part of his desire to survive, will always deny that he is doing something good, even when he clearly is. He will usually give a selfish excuse for doing something that is clearly good. And that excuse is usually fairly transparent and does not hold up under examination, as the people around him point out.
Avon has a nasty, negative and insensitive manner. But there are several interesting things to observe about this behaviour. Avon is rarely nasty, negative, snarky or insensitive to people who have not made the mistake of attacking him first. But if anyone makes that mistake, Avon starts treating them as someone he has to protect himself against (“the enemy”) and he will deal with them in kind from then on. There are only four people Avon treats in this manner: Blake, Vila, Gan and Tarrant. They all initiated the first attack on Avon and he is wary and openly hostile to all of them after that point. And for these four, there are very specific types of attacks that Avon does not seem to forgive and that is why they become “the enemy” in his eyes. With Vila and Gan, they attack Avon's intelligence/abilities, this is a big no-no for a man who considers these to be his most defining characteristics and value. With Blake and Tarrant, they both made the mistake of bullying Avon and are also precipitous morons lacking in basic intelligence, also another no-no. Avon does not suffer fools gladly and fools who insist on pushing their will on him or try to manipulate others into seeing him negatively are the most unforgivable of all.
There are a few other instances where Avon acts negatively outside of these people, and that is when Avon faces crass stupidity. He can't stand idiocy and is not afraid to say so. But even then, Avon rarely does this outside of the four people identified.
Even for the four attackers, Avon rarely is negative or goes on the attack unless they provoke him in some way first. He does occasionally attack or is negative without provocation but he doesn't do it often.
The majority of Avon's interaction with people is fairly subdued when he is not angry, afraid, defensive or negative. He mainly relays information or answers to questions, usually from Blake. In seasons 1 and 2 particularly, Avon is not very communicative. About half of his conversations are either monosyllabic or only contain at most two or three words or a single sentence. It's not until seasons 3 and 4, after Blake is gone that Avon carries on full conversations with people and gives detailed explanations.
Outside of the four people, Avon is generally non-negative and non-combative. At times, he is polite, even pleasant and shows interest and clear social tendencies.
Emotions
Emotionally, Avon is best described as stony-faced. He rarely shows emotions, although his eyes do seem to be very expressive of the emotions he tends to hide. We know that this is a very deliberate face he puts on because of the number of times that he shows clear emotion after someone leaves the room. That is not to say that Avon is not emotional, even externally.
Generally, the emotions Avon allows to be displayed are the negative emotions of anger, fear and hatred. Perhaps because another primary characteristic Avon has is that he bottles up his feelings and these emotions build up to the point where he can't control them.
Other very visible emotions are amusement and irony. Avon has a strong sense of both, particularly with Vila in terms of amusement, and Cally at times. The only other strong emotions Avon shows is when someone is hurt or someone needs his help. Then his positive emotions show, even though he may not like the person. He can be gentle, tender and caring; though he usually only shows these if the person he is expressing this for is unconscious and can't see his emotional reactions. There is one other categories of emotion and that is curiosity, accomplishment, disgust and irritation.
Avon's Perfect World
Avon is an explorer and investigator at heart, be it murder mysteries or some scientific or technical pursuit. He loves working with his hands in creating and modifying things. He also loves applying his mind to problems. He has a restless mind that constantly pursues things to think about. Avon cannot stand things that don't make sense and things that are not based on logic or fact. He has a need to see or prove something before he will believe it. He rarely takes things on faith or trust. Avon requires objective proofs. That is why he prefers computers and machines to people. He can't stand hypocrisy.
His perfect world is one where there are no human beings around. Interestingly, he doesn't include aliens in this category. Even though he expresses this desire, and the professes that he can manage alone, Avon deliberately seeks out company and interactions with people. Even as far as playing socially interactive games with them or to eat together with them. The one time he tries to initiate conversation with Blake and show interest, he gets attacked, which really seems to turn him off any further voluntary interactions with Blake.
The Genius
Avon is an extremely industrious person. He is working constantly, either to maintain/fix the ship, invent new things, think of ways to protect the ship, to pursue his curiosity, to understand his environment or to investigate new possibilities for meeting their collective goals.
Avon is a genius and has skills and knowledge of many, often unrelated, disciplines. It is highly doubtful that he is just a computer tech. He definitely is one as Vila knows him as one. Vila also says that he is the number two man in all of the Federation in computers. But I also doubt this. It is possible that Avon is actually the number one man. Vila's only basis for calling him number two is that because he was caught and so he assumes that someone better than him in computers caught him. But Avon said that the problem was that he relied on other people, not because of any lack in computer skills. In fact, Avon is very certain that he can, at any time, steal 100 million credits from the Federation Banking System and no one would know.
A list of the things Avon can do or shows knowledge of in the series: computers (software and hardware), ciphers (both the machines and breaking of codes), reactors, weapons and bombs, ship's scanner technology and logic puzzles.
Avon's Presentation About Himself
The few times Avon does say positive things about himself, usually not to one of the four, I believe that we can take them seriously. The reason is that it seems to explain his other actions. At times Avon shows clearly empathy and understanding of people and about himself. That knowledge doesn't just come out of the blue, Avon has to have always been like that but he rarely allows that side of himself to come out unless he is in a situation where he does not feel like he needs to be defensive.
Avon rarely responds to negative views about him. If anything, he will even encourage it or even make himself seem worse. Whether it is because he never wants people to see him as good and always wants to present a hard shell or it is a defensive reaction for him to automatically go on the offensive. There is only one type of circumstance in which Avon will defend attacks on his character and those are attacks on his abilities or intelligence.
Invasion of Space
The invasion of personal space seems to be another area that people point out in terms of Avon. Actually if you take a look at the number of times Avon is in close proximity to people, you will find that it is not Avon who usually initiates the majority of them. Avon tends to keep himself aloof and isolated from the others. He has a handful of times acted aggressively but the majority of the dominating behaviour comes from Blake, not Avon. Blake starts doing this almost from the beginning and continues doing it throughout their association. Most of the time Avon seeks close proximity to people, it is purely for functional reasons. Only a few times is it not. In fact, in a lot of confrontations, Avon walks away from the conflict, up to and including leaving the room.
Avon and Helping Others
Avon does not have a natural tendency to help people whom he doesn't know, unlike Blake ”the bleeding heart”. But he always does end up helping them. And unlike Blake's “help”, Avon doesn't sacrifice other people's lives or safety to do it. Usually he only tries to endanger himself.
Avon and the Truth and His Attitude Towards Lies
Avon likes truth. He seems to have a problem with lying. Apart from the “shell” he presents to other people, which hides his true nature, Avon doesn't generally lie directly about things. When he does lie, he's so not used to it that he does it very badly. The only other lies he tells are indirect ones that are not technically lies. He will tell the truth, but not the whole truth. Unlike Blake who will tell bare-faced and convincing lies without batting an eye.
Avon and Appreciation
Avon shows real appreciation for people who do things for him or treat him well. Of course, this rarely happens to him but when it does, he is very grateful and he is pleasant, even to one of the four. Even extremely grateful, even if the person who does something for him has also just been very nasty.
Avon and the Pursuit of Wealth
Avon has an interesting relationship with wealth. On the surface he is a greedy man who wants to pursue as much wealth as he can get his hands on. But on analysis, you really have to question if he truly is greedy or if there is an underlying motivation. From the beginning, Avon tells us that the reason why he values wealth is because in the Federation, it is the only reality. I don't think Avon likes wealth in itself, but he feels that he has no choice in order to survive. And survival is the key here because not only does he want to pursue wealth because it is the only reality but what he tells us is that there is a primary motivation for that pursuit and that greed is not it. Avon wants the wealth purely for survival; so that no one would be able to touch either him or Anna. He says this twice, once in season 1 and again in season 3. In fact Avon shows he's not greedy because of his actions in Gambit and after Blake is gone. Yes, Gambit. But I will explain it in the episode analysis. After Blake is gone, Avon could very well have used the Liberator's wealth to live richly but he doesn't. He could also very easily use it to acquire more wealth by becoming a pirate or smuggler. And no Avon never was a pirate. There were only two times the crews were involved in piracy. Once Avon was not involved at all. In the other, Avon had a primary motivation, and that was to have a chance to get Servalan. And in Terminal, Avon did not go after Blake because of the treasure but due to what Servalan had identified, which was not greed.
Avon, Combat and the Nature of Violence
Avon is not a violent man by nature. He only resorts to violence if he is pushed into it. Given half a chance, even when his life is in danger, Avon will chose not to kill and will even stop other people from killing. Apart from the violent, destructive things Avon does for Blake, which he never does after Blake is gone, Avon, only kills purely when his life or the life of someone else is in direct danger of being lost. These are usually instinctive, snap killings where he doesn't have time to think. When Avon is given a chance or if he has time to think, even if his life is in direct danger, Avon chooses to take non-lethal actions. The only anomalies are Orbit, Rumours and Blake but I think there are extenuating circumstances in those cases that are pointed to by other factors and other aspects of his character.
Avon is not only not a violent man by nature, he is not a natural or experienced killer when we first meet him. When we first see him, Avon has only killed once before. And it wasn't a killing as much as it was self-defence because the other man tried to kill him first. In his first fight, which occurs on the London, Avon shows that he has knowledge of fighting skills but he is not experienced. He fights desperately. It's a tooth-and-nail fight. It is not a polished fight in contrast to his later ones. As time goes on, Avon gets better at it.
Avon's Costumes
In terms of costumes, at first Avon wears softer colours and materials but as Blake becomes more and more of a threat and a bully and Avon finds his life increasingly in danger, he has more tendencies to wear clothing with a harder protective shell and darker colours. So in S2 he starts wearing leather. In S3, Avon goes back to lighter colours and slightly less protective materials but after he loses the Scorpio, he almost exclusively wears black leather.
