What is this "uninteresting" and/or "bland" personalities people speak of?

[Junkhead]

Throughout my stance here on SF, I have heard many complaints of people saying such things. I must be greatly lacking in judgement and observation for me to never be able to tell that. I never really complained about anything of that sort, I just don't get it. "Uninteresting" is something rather subjective as well.

[Thor Odinson]

For me at least it's when a character is written flatly and doesn't really have depth. Any character type can be interesting if written well-not everyone has to be Tony Stark to be interesting-actually that'd be really boring if everyone has the same personality-but it's how their personality and depth and history and interactions with others (or hell, themselves) play out and how they work with each other. Some characters have the misfortune to have landed with a writer who was not able to give them such depths.

Edited July 30, 2013 by Thor Odinson

[Jotari]

A lot of characters in Fire Emblem can end up in a bad way characterwise due to the nature of the series. A certain amount of units in a certain amount of different classes are need in each game so right from the get go a lot of characters need to be made. Even then most of them can't have an active role in the main plot of the game since they can die anytime after their recruitment. As a result the only thing a character really has to go on to show their depth is their supports which always have to focus on two characters at once. Supports are also time consuming to build and outside of Awakening have a set number that can be supported with per play through so not all players will get to see all aspects of the character. This can leave a lot of characters looking very bland and uninteresting simply because it's hard to write for so many characters and even harder to actually show off their character thanks to the nature of the game.

[FrostyFireMage]

The next FE game should make character death more significant, kind of like how in FE10 an event is different depending on whether Calill is dead or not.

[Momo]

Fire Emblem has never been very good at characterization, and I don't really think the series is fit for it, using the current style. FE13 tried to fix it a little, but you still end up with two portraits spouting lines of dialogue at each other forever, and it makes them all feel rigid and uninteresting.

[AnonymousSpeed]

Fire Emblem has never been very good at characterization, and I don't really think the series is fit for it, using the current style. FE13 tried to fix it a little, but you still end up with two portraits spouting lines of dialogue at each other forever, and it makes them all feel rigid and uninteresting.

By this standard, Mario is a more interesting character than...almost everyone in video games. And all book characters are horribly boring and uninteresting.

[Ema Skye]

It helps justify a dislike of a fictional character.

[Trickster]

By this standard, Mario is a more interesting character than...almost everyone in video games. And all book characters are horribly boring and uninteresting.

I agree, I think Fire Emblem does really well with characterization for certain games. 7, 9, 8 sometimes, and 13. The earlier fire emblems struggle a bit sometimes giving characterization to only a few making us have characters like Ralph from 5 making us wonder, 'why the hell is he even here?' So in short on this topic, there are boring characters, but generally in earlier games rather than the later ones. But to actually answer the question: People who either A) are generics (generally knights or cavaliers) who put all before their country but have nothing else to go on besides that, B) people who join up solely for the reason of 'just cause~' or C) people who just don't get any characterization period.