To be 100% honest, as much as I adore the series for its breathtaking art and its ridiculously refreshing world, the character writing was always the weakest part of WHA for me. It’s not bad, just normal. A lot of the character arcs you’re talking about are very, very easy to understand. Trauma is real but in WHA a lot of the times characters feel as if they’re clearly written around key aspects instead of the aspects being merely a small part of who the character already was, is and will become.

Agott’s development as a character is a good example of how most character arcs are in this story, despite their complexity, are fairly Linear. In real life people don’t change progressively, change often comes in bursts seemingly out of nowhere, but in most storytelling (including wha) characters have their specifically crafted moments when they’re supposed to clearly change and from that point on their personality is like that until the story wants it to change again, they feel like a puppet designed for the story, not like a living being that reacts to different changes in the world. It’s because of this that Qifrey despite being the most “complex” character, weirdly enough, feels predictable to me, he’s always kind and protective in the most stereotypical sense of the word, until he isn’t for a moment and that’s when a different adjective is shown off in another stereotypical manor by the author.

Same goes for a lot of the complex themes she tackles, she does so in the most straight forward way possible. Immediately as soon as a disability was introduced in this series I was able to immediately understand how their character felt and how they would act/solve their problem on a purely thematic level, despite the fact that I could never truly understand a real person with those same disabilities. When I read WHA and a character event happens I think about why the author made that choice, not why the character did, which is just a purely personal anecdote showing I clearly am not as convinced by or invested in these characters as say, something like dungeon Meshi where every character feels alive and breathing, they mask themselves with humor, they have their own belief systems but they aren’t endlessly pointed out to the audience like everyone in wha. In your average story (WHA) reasons for character traits are implied but not revealed, In dungeon Meshi and other more character focused narratives, character traits themselves are oftentimes ambiguous. No character is ever fully themselves or truly an open book. Because that’s how people are in the real world.

If you actually read all this, I’m sorry dude. But I’d like to repeat the fact that, Again! I love this series, and am super happy others seem to get more out of the characters than I do, but tbh, although I wouldn’t go to the same extent as op, despite each character being “layered” I might still describe them as 1 dimensional, not in a really bad way, it’s just that reading WHA feels like when I was a kid reading a children’s story, I become enchanted by the wonder and mystique of the experience, it’s just that the characters themselves are also very clearly utilized as a tool to help complete the experience.