User blog comment:IamJakuhoRaikoben/Sorcerer Magazine, Issue 41: May 2015/@comment-24039234-20150601201135/@comment-24039234-20150603183450

@Raven: Heh, yeah, if you put it like that. :) Maybe sometimes people (me included - heck, sometimes I feel like this about the entire series) feel otherwise, because in a longer series there might be a really big difference between what we expected from a character and what we got, your Juvia description being a good example: she had some really awesome (both epic and touching) moments in the beginning, then she just vanished. So, we could say, that what we saw at the beginning was her "character" we've come to love, then later the writer did her a disservice by handling her differently.

Of course, this makes absolutely no sense logic-wise, it is only about the feelings one might have about a character and a story. Logically speaking you're right, the writer has supreme control over his story, so whatever we think, the present Juvia is her true character, and any criticism we have goes only towards Mashima's work in the end.

There is only one question that remains: why did I write all this down? Oh well, sorry for the long post and fck a potato. Cheers! ^^