Why Erenville succeeded as a character where others did not

[Iscah]

We met Namikka in both human and Endless form, we met Otis' soul separate from his Endless form. Were they somehow lesser to you? We met Cahciua before we knew she was an Endless, were you thinking of her as lesser back in Solution Nine?

Well... yes?

Not Cahciua, because we met her before we knew what was going on and had no reason to not regard her as a living person (or suspected possibly dead person in possession of soul and memory).

But finding Namikka's Endless self isn't exactly an argument in favour of these being real people fully engaged in the world around them. She's trapped in a memory, panicked that she can't find the "little girl" she's been charged with looking after, despite that girl not existing in Living Memory at all.

And Otis – we already met Otis, saw him die, and can reason that this is an incomplete copy of the real person from an earlier stage in his life. We can engage with him like a real person when he's speaking to us, but a chatbot does that too.

I think the underlying reason [for Erenville's accent] actually stems from exactly what I said in the first reply, to bring things back to the topic: they weren't writing him for Dawntrail in Endwalker. They didn't write him or cast him knowing he'd be from Tural (in fact, a few of us noticed his Endwalker short story was edited after publishing to remove a mention of his name origin that doesn't line up with Dawntrail). And then naturally we get into a weird situation where the English localization specifically has been painted into a corner, because only English gave him a noticeably different accent.

The far simpler solution would be to give all of the Shetona that standard Viera accent, just like Lyna has it despite being raised in a culture with a predominantly different accent. Erenville, even if not originally planned to be Shetona, is still the first Shetona character in the game and so should be a reference point for what follows.

There are a number of locations specified as being in "the Shetona language" so it's not a stretch for them to have a different accent to the other cultures if they're intended to have a different language. Accents in FFXIV have been race-based for such a long time that it's bizarre they've chosen this moment to decide that everyone from the same location gets the same accent even if it messes with an existing character fitting into his own culture.

Or at minimum, give Cahciua that accent and imply that she's Othardian Viera originally.