Why Erenville succeeded as a character where others did not

[Catwho]

Erenville seems like a poor example for this phenomenon, because when he finally got his time in the spotlight, it was entirely squandered. He desperately wants to find his mother, then when he finds her he just silently and begrudgingly tolerates her emotional abuse, then after hours of that he has a sudden character shift where he professes to the abusive AI copy of his mother that he'll make his life's purpose to continue working towards her dreams or whatever. He was with us for so long, and in all that time nothing meaningful or coherent happened. And that has the unfortunate effect of making him seem like a more hollow and uninteresting character than he was before he was given his time to shine.

I don't think MSQ is done with Erenville. He's EXTREMELY popular among the fanartist set (and was long before Dawntrail.) That's one of the unofficial metrics that the dev team seems to use for how popular a character is - and I'm sure they were surprised by unexpected thirst track Bakool Ja Ja based on that metric.

That said, him being quiet about his inner turmoil over watching his entire civilization disappear in the blink of an eye is on point. Not every character externalizes their emotions. Him keeping the entire thing bottled up those last few levels tracks with the kind of personality he was shown to have.