(Yukari as a character is a distraction. If you told me you made a character that could manipulate any conceptual border, I would have told you to throw that character out.
thankfully you are not the head of touhou character design because then we'd be out what is, in my opinion, one of the better characters in the series
She's too powerful to be a hero or a villian,
since when does power have any bearing on alignment? or whether or not you can be either or? haven't you ever read comics?
any defeat immediately starts "why didn't she just...?" questions,
no it doesn't. especially as how yukari has been defeated in canon(iamp and swr)
and its very difficult to like a character that can resolve any problem with a quick shift in the boundary between safe and danger but decides to nag a weaker character into resolving it instead.
it's really easy to like yukari imo. and why shouldn't she nag others to fix things? I can think of a million reasons. for one, it might not even be her problem. maybe it's fun to watch them solve things. maybe she wants them to grow stronger. maybe she just likes to bother people. maybe she wants to see their limits. maybe she wants to see how they fight or think. I'm not even scraping the surface with these few statements.
Especially since you can argue that merely the declaration of a boundary makes it conceptual - I declare that there is a boundary between doing nothing and saving the world, then the concept of that boundary is formed, and Yukari can manipulate it all she wants.
think avatar: the last airbender for a second. just because what's-her-face can bend water doesn't mean she can control the entire ocean at once.
I could even sympathize if she didn't do anything because she didn't want to, and was tired of solving everyone's problems. But she seems to put more effort into getting other people to resolve incidents than if she just did it herself.)
this methodology just strengthens the reasoning behind many of the possibilities I listed above.
Are you two talking about written fiction specifically? Because I can think of a whole bunch of awesome movies that seemed to ignore characterization. Generally, action movies are very light on good characterization.
I would really like some examples as to what movies completely ignore characterization as even the most plotless and paper thin characters have characterization if the movie is any good. while yes, it does take a back seat in action movies, it's still there and not ignored at all.
Truth be told, I consider myself to be fairly good at the characterization part, at least for characters I care about.
you shouldn't. especially considering the things you say in the rest of your paragraph.
In concept, it's easy to make the character have a great deal of depth,
actually it's supposed to be quite a lot of work.
but I always have trouble getting the depth across.
this is one of the lines I meant. if you're bad at getting depth across, how are you good at characterization?
It seems harder to do the characterization of other characters though, and being outside the head of the character is always the hard part for me; - the thoughts are what make the characters interesting, and if you can only see them through actions, then getting across things like motivations and their true feelings is hard, especially in a not particularly forthcoming character.
actually a lot of the depth in a character comes from their actions. especially the little things. if yuugi is talking about a pretty girl and parsee balls up the fabric of her skirt in her hands, it paints a pretty clear image that parsee is (of course) jealous. and is much more entertaining and interesting than "parsee got jealous"
It doesn't help that I can't really pick up on the cues that make a character's real thoughts clear.
you should really work on that if you want to be as good at characterization as you claim to be