I mean a big part of that is what do you define as "a character?" Personally, they fit what I want perfectly in the sense that I think their stories are incredibly interesting and they exists within interesting roles (to me) within their stories. Part of what helps is that the world is just inherently interesting, so even mundane things like going to the grocery store become these interesting stories to me.
Mostly character depth. You know, feeling like a real person. I feel that every character I meet is very two dimensional and shallow, but their very mysterious which offers the illusion of depth.
Again, very personal to me, I think every character in BB is great and they don't' get enough credit as they deserve. Eileen is one of my favorite characters in anything in large part because she's just an old woman who is tired. Not necessarily of her work, not of the killing, not of any grand conceptual/philosophical reason. She is just physically tired because she's old and can't quite hunt the way she used to anymore. And I love that about her. Same with most of the NPCs, I could wax poetic about the hunters but also of some of the town folk you pick up.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I mean. All we actually know is that she was a hunter of hunters and then got too old to do it anymore. She's grateful when you help her out (a reaction that almost any basic human would have) and she succumbs to madness gripping the rest of Yharnam's inhabitants. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but anything else is just trivial information, like that she knew henrik (which is natural, since she's old, it's not surprising that she'd be familiar with other hunters in her time here).
Anything else, like that she's foreign or whatever, that's stuff we can only speculate about. And when you speculate, you start writing depth to a character that isn't there.
Look, I like Eileen too. I certainly don't dislike any of Bloodborne's characters. And I don't think there's anything wrong with speculating what you can infer from vague clues left in other parts of the narrative. But there's no meat to it and being able to wax poetic about isn't remarkable. People have been singing songs about the most broad, vague, and simple concepts since the start of time. Love for instance.
And I think that's alright. The simple can also be quite powerful. Bloodborne's atmosphere and feel are more important to it's narrative than the characters. And my personal journey through Bloodborne left my mind lingering on it far longer than most games with deeper characters have. For me, Bloodborne felt like a dream, scary and confusing, and there's no reason that shouldn't be true of it's characters.
But I was replying to Aters statement of her barely feeling like a character and he's right, because I define character by how much they feel like a real person. Eileen, or any souls character, does not. She feels like a dream.
Side note: have you read the Pale Blood Hunt? If not, I'd recommend it because it actually offers a really neat digs kinda too deep theory that really offers a whole new context to view some of the characters like Eileen and Djura.
I read part of it through, including the parts of Eileen and Djura. The only thing I gained from it is the understanding that I do not care what Souls stories are.
They have a narrative, but if I go actually go try to pay attention to it, the actual facts of the narrative are vague and shallow and, more often than not, unsatisfying. Most inferences that can be made require huge leaps of logic. "She's wearing clothing that in the item descriptions sounds like it's foreign. She must be foreign as well!" ....So? That really doesn't tell me anything about her. She's no more or less remarkable than if I had assumed she was native. Besides, it doesn't even prove she's native. Hunters can just put on any clothes they feel like, so she could have just as easily looted this gear like I did.
Trying to clue find in souls stories are a pure intellectually driven exercise. If you try and search for answers, you'll find a few, but when you get down to it, does the exercise actually make you care more? Is there any more significance gleamed for the fact that you discern some obscure fact from the mystery?
For others, I'm sure the answer is yes, but for me, I stopped reading about halfway through because I realized that none of the answers made me care more about the story than I had if I hadn't read them. I still like the story of Bloodborne....Love the experience of bloodborne, I should say.
But if I'm going to be a part time writer of the series, where I infer and imagine more narrative than is actually there in the game, I'd rather go full in, which is why I disregard the descriptions and everything and just role play some kind of character. My BB character was a jokester noble that made wisecracks about the cosmic horrors he encountered. He was a nice guy that did his best to help out, but often fucked up. It later became clear that his humor was him just trying to cling to insanity, with questionable success. For example, when he realized that killing Rom broke the spell, he blamed Master Willem and went straight back to confront him. As Master Willem was unresponsive, my character eventually just left in anger.....only to run back from the gates and stab him to death.
I have no problem enjoying my own narrative if the game's fails me. It's basically how I play pokemon. I don't care what the actual game narrative is, I'm writing my own character and my own story in my head as I go along. But I do consider it a failure of the game's narrative to engage me emotionally. As amazing as Bloodborne is, I feel there's something wrong with a game if I don't care about anyone. Like, I like Eileen as a concept just fine, sure. But I lacked any pathos at her death as a player. It's just "Oh, so that was the next step of her quest." I felt no particular desire to do right by her. My character that I was roleplaying cared, because he's the sentimental type, and that's how I played him, but I myself didn't. Because she was just too shallow to feel like a real person to me.
