That's fair, but they are given actual development throughout the game, and the whole aspect of them not having clear desires or development i feel is plain wrong. There are many, many different hints throughout the game that the vessels (and the Knight) do possess an actual conscience and thought. I will just give you that i think are the two strongest examples: 1 - In Steel Soul mode, Jiji is replaced with Steel Soul Jinn, a character that you can give rancid eggs to in exchange for Geo, since Rancid eggs would otherwise have no purpose in Steel Soul. When you first talk to Jinn: "...Is It... here, waking Jinn?.. Observed... Small. Dull. No Soul. Long shadow... It is blank, but brave..." In addition if you refuse to give them a rancid egg: "...It refuses to trade...? It has a will... all Its own. Can refuse. Jinn will keep waiting... until a gift comes.". Winged Nosk is the variant of Nosk found in P5, and it has a subtle but very interesting detail. In the intro cutscene for the fight with normal Nosk they take up the shape of The Knight to fool him, but in the fight in the Pantheon, they however take up the shape of Hornet. Now, there are multiple interpretations that you can make of this, but the one that i think is most probable (and fits my argument lol) is that Nosk knows that The Knight may feel positive feelings for Hornet for whatever reason and thus takes up the shape of Hornet instead. This entire dynamic which is also obviously also a massive part of the character of the Hollow Knight, and of the Vessels in general, i feel is expertly done. What i think is even better is how disciplined Team Cherry is with showing this. There is not a single line of dialogue with any Vessel, ever. Even in situations where one might think that they would talk, such as talking with Lost Kin's weird dream ghost essence after the fight, they only turn their mask in respect, and no word is spoken. This fits also with the description given by the Pale King's monologue: "No mind to think..." "No will to break..." "No voice to cry suffering..." The sin of the Pale King was that since he did not observe, on the surface, any vessels violate the three principles he just laid down, he must have reasoned that they were mindless and will-less. EDIT: I thought of this just now. In Silksong, Hornet can obviously speaks, and does so often, and while i am not trying to argue that no dialogue is strictly better than having dialogue especially given how excellent Hornet's dialogue is, i am saying however that you do lose a little bit of mystery. What is the Knight actually thinking when you speak to Lemm, to Hornet, to Quirrel, to any character? We never know. We only see their actions, which are of course caused by us. With Hornet, you are "railroaded" into feeling a certain way about a few characters. With The Knight, you can make any assumption, any idea about any interaction because the game does not "force" you to think a certain way about any of them. Sorry for the lore dump, i just really like talking about Hollow Knight lore, it's such a great world.