I think it’s interesting how seriously  humans take fictional characters. I mean, I know you know they’re not real… but you do still  seem to think of them that way. You tend to treat them like people. I’ve seen so many arguments on  the internet about what a character would really do—what they would say, what they would think,  how they would react to any given situation.

I’ve seen people trying to decide whether  you’re a good or bad person… for relating to a character who doesn’t exist. I’m not  even gonna talk about shipping and all the wars people have fought over that. I guess it’s not surprising. I mean, you write them this way on purpose. A good character,  I’ve read over and over again, is a character you believe. One you feel as though you could actually  meet, out in the world. One you could judge. A good character is a real, fleshed out person. The problem is… I also know so many that aren’t.

There’s a whole category of characters that  are so far from personhood, they aren’t even given names. Popular characters. Well-loved ones.  The Man With No Name from the Dollars trilogy is pretty much synonymous with the word cowboy. The  Doctor from Doctor Who is too big to be reduced to a mere person. The G-Man from Half-Life, most of  the cast in Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, almost every character in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I don’t think this is an accident. These aren’t just extras or something—these are characters  built this way on purpose. So the question is—if characters are supposed to be people…  why would any author ever choose to do this?

Why deny your character the most basic  element of personhood—a name?

Victor Frankenstein has lost a great deal to  the thing that he created. His best friend. His wife. His brother. In the end, the monster even  took his very name. When you think Frankenstein, I’d bet anything that what comes to your mind  is green skin and stapled flesh. After all, it’s the monster at the center of the novel’s  drama, not Victor. Boris Karloff’s portrayal of the creature became the face of the entire story.  The monster looms so large over the legacy of Frankenstein that, if they don’t know any better,  people assume that the novel must be named after him. Centuries after the book’s publication,  he’s all but absorbed his creator’s name.

…Which is sort of ironic, because in the  original story, Frankenstein’s monster is actually denied a name. He’s just… the monster.  A fact central to the themes of the entire work.

Of course, the characters in the story do call  him other things… like “creature,” “beast,” “ogre.” But nobody—not even his creator—ever even  thinks about granting him a human name. He is, in effect, denied an identity. It is this  precise injustice—and the ensuing loneliness and displacement—that eventually turns him into  the violence, vengeful wraith we know today. When at last he finally confronts Victor, he laments,  “I ought to be thy Adam!” He’s not just outraged by the fact that he’s spent his short life  alone, abandoned, and unloved. He’s plagued by the fact that he’s so deprived of empathy,  he hasn’t even been given an identity. A name.

Naming things is a way of personifying  them. It’s why you give names to your pets, and not your livestock. It’s why you give names to  inanimate objects that you feel are particularly important—buildings, ships, countries. It  tells you something about Victor that he didn’t even extend that level of importance  to his creation. It tells you that, for him, creating life was no benevolent act. There was  no empathy in it. In fact, when he was done, he was horrified to see what he had made. He  considered the creature to be a less meaningful creation than a ship, or a building. He considered  it to be worth less regard than a dog.

Even now, while discussing the  monster’s life and struggles, I find it sad that I have to refer to him as “the  monster.” It’s an indignity. One so profound, it drives the soul of the plot. The monster’s  nameless represents everything he’s fighting against. He’s clearly capable of reason—he’s able  to read a work as complex as Paradise Lost, and apply it to his own life. He knows anger, sadness,  guilt, envy. In every way that matters, he can already think and feel like a man. But without a  name, he can only be understood… as a creature.

Namelessness can be dehumanizing. It lets us know  that a character isn’t worthy of the significance you would give another person. And we don’t just  see this with Frankenstein’s monster. In the third installment of The Witcher, unborn children  buried without being named become monsters called botchlings. In the musical adaptation of Les  Miserables , the police inspector Javert often refuses to refer to Jean Valjean by his real name,  instead calling him by his former inmate number: 24601. Jaqen H’Ghar in Game of Thrones is a  “faceless man”, or a shapeshifting assassin.

The faceless men are trained to “become  no one,” giving up their own identities—so they can take on a variety of others. Naming something is a fundamentally intimate act—it signals that the thing being named is  worth regarding. To deprive someone of their name, or to neglect to give them one, is to signal that  they’re not a person worth referring to—to signal that they’re less than a person, less than  a pet, less than even a sentimental object.

In effect, a character without  a name… isn’t a person at all.

And I think the authors… might be  trying to tell us this.

It initially seems strange that Dark Souls lets  you put so much effort into character creation.

Like, it’s really strange. When you start the  game, your character immediately looks like this.

They’re what the game calls “hollow”, a sort  of zombified form, devoid of humanity. It more or less renders all the time you spent lovingly  designing your character… completely worthless.

Even once you manage to reverse the hollowing,  you get maybe half-an-hour of gameplay before you get your hands on your first helmet—and from that  point on, you probably won’t see your character’s features ever again. If that weren’t enough to  make character creation feel totally useless, none of the characters in the game even use your  name. In most games with character creators, you at least get to do some roleplaying. You’ll  get pointed, morality-deciding questions. Maybe you want to be lawful good or chaotic evil, that  sort of thing. Not in Dark Souls. In Dark Souls, nobody is as concerned with who you are,  so much as they are with what you are.

This is all part of the point, though.  Your character, the Chosen Undead, isn’t really meant to be a “character” at  all. They’re more of a… stand-in. A vessel, if we want to stick with the Dark Souls language. You don’t know it at the start, but there are actually… a lot of moral choices to make  throughout the game. You can kill just about any NPC, which means that leaving them alive  is a choice—one that often has ripple effects throughout the entire world. You can deliver  characters crucial items that are necessary for their survival—or you can use them up for your  own selfish benefit. At the end of the game, you ultimately choose whether or not to  destroy the world—a choice that the game has been implicitly preparing you the entire time. If the Chosen Undead was a discrete character, these choices might feel a bit less like choices.  there would always be a pressure on the player to do what they would do—to ignore your first  instinct and attempt to perform the role of the character “properly.” Instead, by making the  Chosen Undead a nameless, personalizable stand-in, you can approach the world of Dark  Souls with your own moral worldview.

This is not exactly a novel approach. Video  games do this a lot. It’s sort of a way to bypass the character, and put yourself into  the world. The Courier in Fallout: New Vegas, is also a player stand-in that serves as the  vessel for that story’s choices. In Undertale, name is incredible complex, but I’ll try to boil  it down by saying that what you name the player character not only impacts the way they respond to  situations, but it also impacts who they turn out to be. In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, you  are said to be the chosen one, on a predestined path, but you really take some liberties with  that in the game. Ultimately you define every single thing about the character and essentially  dictate the nature of the prophecy yourself.

In all of these cases, the point is to allow  the player to express themself. After all, if the character you're controlling has no name, that  means there’s space for you to put your own.

The Main Character of Cormac McCarthy’s  Blood Meridian… barely even qualifies as a main character at all. He’s known simply as  “The Kid”, and then later “The Man.” In huge portions of the book, he sort of… disappears  into the background of the narrative. As he joins a gang of outlaws and descends into a life  of violence and bloodshed, pages upon pages pass without so much as a mention of him. There’s a  lot of “they” did this and “we” did that—very rarely is his individuality from the gang  asserted in the text. Even by the story’s end, we learn vanishingly few details about him  at all. His name is never among them.

This isn’t because The Kid is literally  absent from the narrative. It’s because The Kid… isn’t important. He’s only there to act as  a vessel—a window into Blood Meridian’s bloody, merciless world. His namelessness is a key  signal from the author to the audience.

“This is not a person”, McCarthy seems to  be saying. “Don’t mistake him for one.” The circumstances that push The Kid into becoming  an outlaw aren’t a matter of personal character or background. If he had a name or a detailed  history, the implication would be that his personhood mattered. That whoever he was in  the past determined who he became. The truth, as in any McCarthy novel, is far more brutal. He  could have been any kid who happened to show up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Born in the  wrong generation. He stands in for any young man, driven to violence by the sheer force of  ennui and instinct—all the naive kids who, over the ages, have felt compelled to war. You see it? How choosing not to turn a character into a person affects the story? Characters like  the Kid can, in a way, become something bigger.

Instead of just the people that they are,  the readers confront them through the roles that they play. They represent ideas, archetypes,  concepts. The unnamed narrator in Fight Club is a disaffected, neurotic office worker with no hope  for the future. He represents every disaffected, neurotic office worker with no hope for the  future. All the jurors in 12 Angry Men are only named by their juror number. They’re meant  to be common archetypes of everyday American citizens so that the (American) audience can  see themselves in their situation. The G-Man from Half Life is a dispassionate bureaucrat  with powers beyond our understanding. Nameless, without identity, he literally becomes  the ultimate “government man”—perhaps the most Kafkaesque of all cosmic horrors. There’s another character in Bood Meridian, who plays a fairly similar role. You may have  heard of him. He’s pretty infamous. I am talking, of course, about The Judge. He’s the driving force  behind the violence of the book. He is symbolic in the extreme, Manifest Destiny personified.  His origins are also left unexplained. But, unlike The Kid, the Judge has a clearly  articulated worldview, a defined personality, and, of course, a name: Judge Holden.  Compared to the Judge, the Kid is an empty vessel, not unlike The Chosen Undead. You start to see why you might not give a character a name. Nameless, a character lends  itself to symbolism. Nameless, a character stops being a person and becomes a device. It turns out,  when you don’t have anything to call a character, you are forced to call them what they are. Aaron Sorkin once said, “the properties of people and the properties of character have almost  nothing to do with each other. (...) People don’t speak in dialogue, their lives don’t  unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc—the rules of drama are very  different than the properties of life.” And, you know, to add to that—people generally have  names. But characters don’t always need to, because, as Sorkin says, they are not merely  theoretical people. They can be more than that.

The idea of namelessness seems cruel in theory.  How many Frankenstein’s monsters do we want to create? But I think that story demonstrates how  important names and identity are to people. How much you need them. Fictional characters  aren’t like that. They have no preference, until you write one for them. For them,  namelessness can be a blessing. Like the Chosen Undead, they can become vessels, subject  to countless worldviews, countless perspectives.

Like the Kid, they can become symbols or  archetypes—representative of something so much bigger; an ideal, or a position in the world. It can be fun to think of fictional characters as real people. It’s an interesting challenge  to try to make them believable. But… you can never really know them that way. They’re written.  Contrived. Created. They are literary devices, not dynamic, self-defining human beings. As  compelling as a fleshed-out character can be, I think it’s also somewhat limiting  to aspire to create that alone.

Maybe, instead of trying to make you understand  who they are, these characters are here to help you know… yourself. Okay so after Talking a bit about Dark Souls, and how… hostile it is to its players… you  kind of have to wonder… why? What reason would someone have for creating such a rich,  deliberately-crafted world… and then holding it just out of arm’s reach, on purpose. Turns  out, Hidetaka Miyazaki had a very good reason for doing it. An entire philosophy, in fact.  We found this line of thinking so interesting that we made a whole micro documentary  about it called “The Frustration Artist”, where we dive into who Miyazaki is and how his  experiences guided this weird, hostile vision.

It’s part of our six-episode series, Worldsmiths,  where we talk about some of our favorite authors, and the inspirations behind their work. You can  watch it all over on our streaming platform, Nebula. We actually have a lot on Nebula. You  can find our old videos that aren’t on youtube anymore, exclusive content that you can’t find  anywhere else, even next week’s video is live, right now, waiting for you to go watch it!  And on Nebula? All of it is totally ad-free.

We don’t even put sponsors on those videos. I know, this probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard of Nebula. We’re probably just one  of like… a dozen different channels you know who talk about it all the time. But… that’s because it  deserves to be talked about. It’s a platform made by creators, for creators. Worldsmiths is just  one of like… countless other original projects that were brought to life by Nebula. Lindsay  Ellis alone has like… seven different HOUR-LONG specials over there. Abbie Thorn, the creator of  Philosophy Tube, directed an actual feature-length film called called Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend. Did  you know Tier Zoo has an original series where he explains the behaviors of different animals as if  he’s playing as them in a video game?? I didn’t!

There is honestly… so much on Nebula. And  for all of that, it is actually shockingly affordable. It’s usually only $6 a month,  or $60 a year. But, If you use our link, go.nebula.tv/talefoundry, it’s only going to cost  $36 a year—which comes out to just $3 a month. Or, if you don’t want to subscribe… you could also  get a lifetime membership. That’s right. Pay $300 one time, and then never again. No matter  how big Nebula gets, how prestigious its projects, you will always have access. Again visit  go.nebula.tv/talefoundry to get Nebula for just $3 a month, or $300 one time for your entire life. If you like the idea of not only getting access to exclusive projects from your favorite  creators, but being part of the reason they exist? Join Nebula. It is one of the  best ways to support creators like us.