Yep, I feel like JK is a great example of what happens when you attack people for not getting things right, instead of gently showing them the error of their ways.
One of my trans friends espoused much the same perspective as yourself. She was a deeply empathetic person at the beginning. If people hadn’t attacked her the way they did, she probably wouldn’t have been radicalized.
Tension and intimacy between characters.
I love the push and pull of characters with tension, how intellectual it can be, or how it can be a multi layered manifestation of their interior world and exterior pressures in ways they don’t even understand.
Conversely, when all that is stripped away and characters have unpretentious, open, vulnerable moments with one another- these moments that happen so rarely in real life and are often peak experiences.
And if there’s a juxtaposition between the two, and the plot is a metaphor for what’s going on on a human level? That’s me done.
A sense of immersion- if I feel like I’m there.
The characters could be doing the most banal thing, but even if I put down the novel for a long time, the sense of immediacy, of realness, will live rent free in my head.
I think you get more of the empathy as the series goes on, Speaker for the Dead in particular is a monument to that quality.