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All Aboard The Magic Hellbus! Let's Play Limbus Company

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With all respect, if they are going with that, IDs would be called egos, as they fit best as the masks the sinners wear in there day-to-day and ego is one big expression of the soul and desires.
 
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The Wings by Yi Sang - A Summary New
  • Informational
    • Well, despite the tremendously turmoil-filled day South Korea is having, now that we've made it through Christmas and out the other side, much like this recent Canto...

    Let's talk about somebody who wasn't nearly so lucky.
    This is going to be my take on (a very brief overview of) the life of Yi Sang, birth name Kim Haegyŏng, how it parallels The Wings, and how The Wings parallels many things in Yi Sang's life... Most importantly in my opinion, The Wings was a mirror held up to the concurrent fate of the Korean people under Japanese rule.

    We'll get there, I promise that's not a tangent or (I feel) a stretch. :V

    The Wings, and One Reader's Interpretation
    (All references will be working with the 2001 PLKL translation by Ahn Jung-hyo and James B. Lee, as well as paratextual information from public sources such as Wikipedia. I cannot guarantee the total accuracy of anything outside of my summary of the text proper.)

    To start with, you should realize that The Wings is quite short, even in the necessarily-longer-by-volume English version. In this edition it runs from pages 7 to 40 of a very heavily spaced and broadly-formatted paperback. The entire text could likely fit into the SV post limit, honestly! It would be counterproductive to actually do that, not to mention disrespectful and possibly illegal... So let's start with a summary. An extremely thorough summary! Yet still, a summary. This is, to me, a story you have to at least read the skeleton of in order to discuss it at all, because none of the details alone tell even a shadow of a fraction of the tale. So forgive me for my long-winded nature, now more than ever.

    CONTENT WARNINGS: This is one of the most depressing and existentially dreadful pieces I've ever read. I had a few weeks of BAD times after going through this story. We'll be seeing plenty of Limbus-typical horrors along with more details ruminations on suicide, self-harm, mental illness, medication overdoses, manipulation, gaslighting, prostitution and whoredom inside of a committed relationship, cheating, drugging, life-threatening exposure to the elements, starvation, and SO MUCH OTHER SHIT.

    'Have you ever seen a stuffed genius? I am happy. At a time like this, even love is pleasant.'

    After this infamous line everybody here should recognize at least half of, we're introduced to the narrator, 'I'. This self-referent is the closest thing we get to a name for our viewpoint character, so for the sake of clarity and English readability, I will be using "Yi" to refer to the narrator, with Yi Sang referring to the author. The narrator also very regularly refers to 'you', which is usually taken to mean the reader themselves.

    Yi / I speaks about how only when we're fully exhausted do we truly shine, turns their illness and need for cigarettes into inspiration, and starts to creature new words on a blank white page again: Yi Sang, the author, writing this story. Yi plans for themself a life with a woman, despite being estranged from love, splitting their whole existence in half to give one side to her even while Yi laughs at himself with both halves. Two more pages follow with very dense and abstruse phrases that relate more to the author than to the narrator, before the proper opening of the narrative.

    A single building, House 33, holds eighteen families in identical units. Yi claims that they don't know how others live because they themselves sleep day and night. Their only clue comes from the sounds and lights of their neighbors, that and the exterior of the house: Yi points out that having eighteen nameplates on a house would be absurd. So each apartment has its own comically-overblown label (Auspicious Pavilion, etc) along with family nameplates.

    Yi's dwelling bears his wife's small name card, and nothing else.

    Yi seems almost childish or regressive, referring to 'playing' with others, and how he doesn't. It wouldn't help his wife's social standing, as she is already by far the most beautiful woman in House 33. Yi claims to be a burden, merely hanging around in her radiance. Meanwhile he heaps praise onto his room for being just the right temperature and constantly just a bit dark, ideal for him. He seeks no happiness or change. 'Everything was alright as long as I was allowed to loaf day after day.'

    Room 7 of House Number 33 is Yi's, shared with his wife but split by a bamboo sliding door. Only his wife's half ever gets any sunlight, and he does not remember when or if they settled on that arrangement... But it's fine, to Yi. Yi finds joy in the smallest things, absolutely trivial: He goes into his wife's room when she is away so he can appreciate how the sunlight glints through her perfumes. It's his 'primary recreation', literally the only thing significant that fills his time, alongside burning tissue paper with a magnifying glass. Yi says the palpable anticipation of waiting for the tiny plume of smoke generates thrills that border on lethal.

    The third activity in Yi's life is to play with a small handheld mirror (his wife's, of course, as all things are). 'A mirror is only practical when it reflects one's own face. At other times, it is only a plaything.'

    His wife's room is full of fascinations, things he barely understands and cannot properly use. Yi's own room is so bare there isn't even a hook to hold the few clothes he does have. He berates himself for sometimes trying to imagine what his wife might look like within her clothes, seeing that as a personal failing. Yi has really only one outfit (his wife does not give him more), a rugged corduroy set that serves all of his needs from pajamas to going-out clothes, with a turtleneck underneath as his sole underwear. All black, the better to wear for days unwashed.

    The wife is late home today, and Yi is late back to his room: He has to be back in his room by the time she gets back, of course. Obviously. He laid under his only quilt and thought, composing poems he would never write. Bedbugs ate his flesh and he scratched until he bled, glorifying that as an act of profound pleasure that sent him peacefully to sleep. He has no need for positive thoughts, just simple facts. He ruminates on his wife's constant cleanliness, on his lack thereof, on his trips out to use the outhouse and how the moon would captivate his thoughts.

    Yi does not know if his wife has a job, or if she does what that job is. He knows she goes out often, he knows she entertains many guests in her home. During those times he must remain under his blanket, and nowhere else. No magnifying glass. No delightful scents of perfumes and basic makeup. No mirror. This does not bother Yi, but he does pretend to be sad. This is because when he does? His wife rewards him in her pity, with a 50 jeon coin. (An aside: This is perhaps a penny or two at most, in today's rates? It's quite hard to find 80+ year old financial comparatives from 3 currency changes ago. This 'jeon' is an archaic subdivision of the won, which itself isn't the same as the modern won.)

    Yi delighted in throwing these coins at his pillow and letting them pile up, until one day his wife saw this pile and gave him a tiny chest for his savings, with a piggy-bank slot. He placed his coins in the slot solemnly, one at a time, before she locked the box and kept the key. He continued to put his coins inside, even once he saw that she was taking the money out again to spend on jewelry for herself. Yi does not mind.

    Yi contemplates how his wife's guests make incredibly crude and forward 'jokes' with her, things he'd never dare say. The nice ones would leave around midnight. The worst ones would order food and stay to greet the sun. Yi tries to search for his wife's job, to understand it, but has too little education and knowledge of the world to even know where to start.

    His food was always there, although he never knew how. It was always terrible, bland at best. He did not complain, even as his skin grew tight over his bones. Yi became pale. Joint pain made sleep difficult or impossible. He soon did more research, this time about what kind of food his wife and her guests ate on the other side of the sliding bamboo door, based on the smells that crossed the boundary.

    He slept poorly that night.

    His wife is given money by her guests. Is this silly? Yi does not know. He knows that after much thought he does not like it, but not so much that he'd ever confront her about it. Once all the guests left she would dress down and visit him, consoling Yi with things that even he knew were lies.

    The happiness Yi got from his coins only lasted a few seconds apiece: From the moment received until it went into the slot, never before in anticipation or after in contemplation. He threw the box away for a time, lamenting the speed at which his life was passing into the aether, but his wife never questioned it and kept giving him coins. A new pillow pile was born. Yi began to wonder if his wife derived pleasure from giving him money, and began to wonder what experiencing pleasure was like.

    Yi snuck out one day, and exchanged all his coins for paper money: A whole entire five won. He had not seen the outside in a long time, so he wandered in a joyful stupor until dark. He was too afraid, uncertain, and ignorant to even spend the money he had during this trip. He came home, opened the door... and saw his wife. and one of the guests. Blinding light and her spiteful stare, the guest's indifferent expression, the route to his own dark room requiring him to cross through this space.

    Yi went under his quilt with aching legs and heart palpitations, begging for sleep to take him as a cold sweat crawled over every inch of his body. He could hear his wife and the guest whisper. Whispering in the same tone that had, until now to his knowledge, been reserved for those beautiful lies she whispered to him at night. He heard them both get dressed, and leave together.

    He slept slowly, and fitfully, and when he woke next it was to see his wife's face full of rage. He closed his eyes to await the storm, and she walked away. He blames himself. It was his fault. She didn't understand. He had only wanted to give his five won to somebody, to anybody, who was not himself. But he had not found anyone on the street who seemed like they would take it. He exhausted himself with blame and slept again... or he tried. Yet after an hour sleep had not claimed him.

    So Yi made a decision in his delirium. He stood. He crossed the border. He stumbled to his wife's bed. He gave her the five won. And he slept.

    This was the first time he had ever slept in his wife's room since they moved to House 33.

    The next day he awoke in pain, and sick, but still in her bed. It was an experience he would never forget, the simple joy of being able to thrust that bill into somebody else's hand, an enthralling process that made him realize why his wife might give him coins, and why her guests might give her money. He felt good enough to go out... But now he had no money, and he felt regret. Until he also felt, in his pocket, two won bills: His change.

    Yi went into the world, strutted happily through society until well after midnight, spending not a single jeon. He went home, met his wife again, and spent his two won to sleep in her bed once more. The next day they had supper together, properly, and he did not understand. He spent the entire meal waiting for the other shoe to drop, but glad this much had happened. The thunder never came. But nor did more money. Yi was bereft once more, until his wife came into the room. She spoke to him like never before, understanding his sadness at being without money. She gave him some, and said it would be fine if he came home even later than usual this time.

    He went out and discovered a tea room, one with proper mechanical clocks that kept time well: He would not go home too early now! He could sit, alone, in his booth with his coffee, and be present in the world. He watched the other clients and felt sad about how they came and drank and left, but he relished that sadness. He read the menu, mystified by names that were as inscrutable as those of long-forgotten friends. They closed well before midnight, and so it was out into the rain with him. The rain was terrible, and sank deep into him. He rushed home, early: His wife would forgive this, the circumstances were unavoidable.

    'When I hurried back home, she was not alone. I was cold and damp. I happened to forget to knock. And I happened to see what my wife would have preferred me not to.'

    Yi returned to his room, climbed under the quilt, and slept despite his rapidly-growing fever and the sense that the world was collapsing. He awoke with a cold, a brutal headache, and his wife by his side. She gave him warm water and four tablets of medicine, which tasted bitter like aspirin, and knocked him unconscious so fast it was like dying. Yi stayed sick for days, and even after his cold faded, his wife kept him in his bed. She said he went out that night just to get sick and be a bother to her. He agreed. So he slept, day and night, chalking his constant need for rest as proof of his recovery.

    A month passed. He finally got up to clean himself up, to trim his beard and hair. He smelled her cosmetics and perfumes once again, he used the magnifying glass, he used the mirror. He spoke his wife's name (for the first time in the entire story), Yeonsim. He laid in his wife's bed. He looked beneath her medicine cabinet.

    He found the bottle of tranquilizers, looking like nothing more than aspirin, and missing exactly four pills.

    Four pills for that morning. Four pills every day for a month. A neighbor of theirs had died asleep in a house fire because of pills like these.

    Yi took the pills and left. He climbed the tallest hill in the region. He did not want to see the world of humanity any longer. He tried as hard as possible not to think of his wife. He found a bench and took the six pills in his pocket, chewing them apart to let the flavor suffuse. Why? He could give no reason: He simply wanted to. He slept.

    When he woke his head spun with thoughts of drugs and truth: Was it true that he'd been drugged for a month, left to rot and die? Had she only been giving him aspirins and this was a coincidence? He rushed down the hill to return home. He set his mind to apologize. His evil thoughts were the ones at fault!

    He got home.

    He saw, yet again, the thing he should not have seen.

    Yi shut the door and tried not to pass out even as his wife came in, choked him, beat him. The 'guest' came in and carried his violent wife away as if she were powerless, utterly submissive in his arms. Yi hated his wife in that moment. She screamed at Yi about how he gallivanted around the city at night sleeping around with women and doing whatever he pleased. He was too aghast at these bald-faced lies to even accuse her of his slow and dreadful (attempted) murder.

    So he stood up, taking every remaining pill and bit of money from his pockets, and placed them before the sliding door that defined his life.

    Yi left immediately after, barely dodging the cars in the street, and walked to the department store. To the roof. Yi asked himself 'What desire do you have for your life?' and was unable to answer even that. He watched goldfish swimming in their bowls, contemplating their movements, and how the people below were just like goldfish: Unable to escape the medium in which they exist.

    The bells rang noon, and that is when Yi remembered his wings. Imitation wings that had once sprouted below his arms, wings of ambition and wings of hope, long since deleted. They fluttered and flipped through his mind like the pages of unwritten poems, and then...

    'I stopped my pace and wanted to shout.
    Wings, spread out again!
    Fly. Fly. Fly. Let me fly once more.
    Let me fly just once more.'

    It ends there.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I wrote this entire thing in one sitting! I need to vomit, or cry, or both.

    OK, so, cool 2800 word '''summary''' of a 33-page story bigmouth: What does all of that even MEAN?

    Let's back up and perform a massively more reductive summary: The narrator of The Wings, a man with no spoken name who calls himself only 'I', is married to a woman named Yeonsim. They live in a tragically dense situation with 17 other families, and his wife is a whore. He does not know his wife is a whore, and to even call her his wife in any functional way is... grim. She's more like his keeper, and he's more like a pet below even a pet, like a goddamn slime mold in a terrarium. His wife tricks him, placates him, lies to him, barely feeds him, isolates him, denies him clothing, steals from him, and whores herself out despite likely having never even held the narrator's hand or properly embraced him even once. He knew nothing, he grew sick, he was drugged and gaslit and blamed for everything, and then he fled to contemplate life on an unshielded rooftop after having taken a suspiciously large number of pills.

    There's a lot of ways to interpret The Wings. Is it a summary of Yi Sang's own life? Yes, absolutely, and in a concerningly prescient way. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis 3 years before writing and publishing this story, and he'd die of the disease a year later, stuck in Japan after being imprisoned on purely ideological charges. Even his closest friends pointed out that the poet's vigorous love of everything in life never once extended even half as far to his own body and health, calling his passing a suicide in all but name.

    Is The Wings a story that reads cleanly and literally? Gods is it ever. It's the tragic back half of the cozy visions some people have of being kept like a pet: This is what life is like as a neglected pet. Too dumb to even utilize freedom when given it, too tame to object when your master beats you, too inhuman to even re-socialize yourself.

    Is The Wings a story about the life of any author? Perhaps! Shaving away your ambitions and hopes just in order to keep the barely-tolerable spiky and thorny 'love' of somebody who doesn't even know you properly, spending your nights dreaming of words and your days idling away as you simply goddamn rot where you stand.

    To me? The Wings is a story of Korea and Japan, in the time the tale was told. A beaten and battered country pushed down to its lowest point, long since stripped of ambition or hope. A people content to sit in their barren shadowed room alongside their master and keeper, smiling and pretending that it's anything resembling a co-equal relationship. Placated with tiny bits of financial aid and only able to find joy in scraps and remnants. A mirror to reflect on their past, scents of someone else's beautiful life, the burning of tissue paper like fireworks...

    Which brings us back to Limbus Company, eh? Been a hot minute. Fireworks... Dongbaek's love of fireworks spoke to me, just like so many other aspects of this Canto. Beauty found in ephemeral things whose heart is destructive by nature, fleeting instants of color and joy forced into a world that is otherwise unspeakably bleak. The Mirror and the colors seen through it were revelations of potential, of things we always had within us but couldn't bring to the surface... Yet. But Limbus' Yi Sang is not reality's Yi Sang, just as he is not the mirror's Sang Yi.

    The wings on his back could be restored just by opening his eyes: They were never gone, and he only needed this journey in order to see the truth! His life after the League was like the story's 'I', a sheltered life where he was kept in one place and separated from the horrible truth by just a single door. The wife who kept him there was at the same time both Sang Yi and Gubo... but Gubo was the one who kept him properly. Gubo was the one who gave him the drugs. Gubo was the gaoler. So why then, did Sang Yi tell him to stay at first? Sang Yi was, perhaps, really the words inside his head. The poems that were never written, the ideas that had no page. Sang Yi was the truth, biding its time. Sang Yi was the fact that there IS a world beyond that door: That if he can put aside these easy simple drugs and the whispered promise of protection, if he clears his head?

    Then he can leave, walk away, trudge through the rain...

    And fly.
     
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  • New
  • Informational
    • I do generally hate to double-post because of forum etiquette... but also putting this anywhere in the prev. would be subtractive and yet it just needs to be said: Here's the REAL TL;DR of the previous post.

    Everybody making memes is correct. Yi Sang genuinely IS the type of guy to walk into McDonald's, stare pensively at the menu for 10 minutes (from a non-obstructive distance), and then softly smile before saying 'a 'happy meal'... I like this idea very much'. He then gets himself some nuggets, fries, Sprite and a toy, because he deserves everything in the entire world and yet this is all he wants or needs. Just a simple moment in which to be happy, with a meal.

    :sad: Fuck. :cry:
     
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    Canto IV: The Unchanging (Part 8) - Postscript New
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    • How do we live when every choice seems to be the wrong one?



    Now that we're finished with Canto IV, the symbolism behind Yi Sang's base EGO art should be rather easy to decode. The vision through the bars of his window, as with all the others whose Cantos we've passed, is of his past - the League of Nine workshop in T Corp's signature sepia tones, surrounded by mirrors as he often was, and the very same world he is able to actualise in his final clash with Dongrang. The cell itself hearkens to his accomodations in N Corp, blank white squares all around. His crow's-feather dagger is discarded, embedded in the ground. His prisoner's jumpsuit shirt is draped over his left shoulder and arm, winglike yet limp and lamed, the edge blackened and frayed in a manner that evokes being burned until you realise that it's ink staining the fabric. His 'real' wings lie shattered on the floor, widening arcs of glass shards scattering from his left and right flanks. The shadow of a great wing stretches over him, perhaps serving a dual purpose as symbolising the shadow of T Corp's oppressive grip on the League, a Wing that he would certainly have rather done without.

    We talked earlier in the Canto about the idea of pain and what it teaches. The way the game compares and contrasts K Corp's flagrant disregard for its employees' suffering to the way that Limbus Company operates, the former fighting like berserkers with no sense of self-preservation while Outis warns that the latter may just become too afraid of pain to do anything at all.

    Much has been made of every way in which Canto IV parallels the story of The Wings earlier in the thread, but the part I want to drill down into first and foremost is the idea of the narrator as someone who is suffering incredibly severe abuse and neglect. The narrator has been reduced to a kind of subhuman, pet-like state by protracted emotional abuse and physical neglect, by any reasonable metric he is suffering terribly every day he's forced to continue living in that state, but he takes precious little action to try and change his circumstances. He rationalises his suffering, he averts his eyes from what's too difficult to explain away, and what little anger that bubbles up within him from the unfairness of it all is quickly suppressed by reasoning that raging against his circumstances would simply be pointless and unhelpful. Pain has taught him not to try, because surely if he takes action he will make everything worse and come to regret his hasty action, so he does nothing. In the end all he can do is mourn the loss of a brighter past, a brighter self, symbolised by the idea that he once had wings and now he does not, standing on a rooftop wishing he could cry out and beg his wings to carry him somewhere else just once more.

    Our Yi Sang has suffered terribly. He is, to be frank, coded extremely heavily as neurodivergent and on the autism spectrum. He cares about his friends and loved ones deeply but he has always struggled to connect with them, even in the brightest days of the League of Nine. To meet another human's eyes is painful to him, and in averting that pain he became something akin to a crow perched somewhere at a remove rather than a part of the social circle, a mere observer to the misfortune that would befall them. The more his comrades suffered the more Yi Sang withdrew, the more he tried to protect himself the more his world came apart. None of this was done out of malice, none of it was even done out of apathy for all that his sin is Sloth. It's as he said in the fathoms of ego - all he wanted was to live without taking from others. He never wanted to hurt anyone. But as Sang Yi was there to remind him, there is no way to live so pure a life in the City. Even as he grew obsessed with hoarding the Mirror, keeping it safe used only by him, the buildings he designed for his employer in T Corp became factories where the lives of dozens, hundreds, were consumed by the Wing's hunger for profit. Exploit, or be exploited. Master or pet. Predator or prey. Through a particularly human kind of cowardice Yi Sang constantly chose what he thought would bring him less pain, and it brought him the loss of everything he ever cared about. Reduced him to that abused, pet-like state where he followed Gubo to N Corp purely because he wanted someone to tell him what to do, to make the choice for him. Someone who could free him from the pain of feeling like he'd wronged someone through his actions. He could no longer even care about preserving the purity of the Mirror because by then he knew that it was the catalyst for the League's fall. The powers that be had caught wind of it, and the great work he made because he wanted to show the people he loved something beautiful, wanted to connect with them the way he found words failed to, only doomed them.

    This is the source of Yi Sang's emotional state for the majority of the story as we've seen it thus far: the apathy of self-hatred. The deeply-held belief that you are unable to make good choices, so you make none. You trust others to be better at it, better than you at the very least. He's practically the posterchild for the fact that 'depth of depression and suicidal ideation != actual suicide risk' because to make such plans would be making a proactive choice to change his life situation, so instead he passively wishes for it. He expresses genuine disappointment when Dante is able to revive him from death, Dongbaek noticed he didn't try to stop her from running him through with the Golden Bough, and in the final battle with Dongbaek he is similarly utterly incapable of defending himself. In a way he is every bit the proof of Outis' claim that the Sinners will be rendered useless as combatants if Dante spends their lives too often and too freely on frivolous things like the Brazen Bull's rampage.

    Through Dongrang, we see the lesson K Corp teaches about pain: it doesn't matter. It's pointless to concern yourself with an immaterial thing like that. That by hurting someone and then removing the effect you can insist that hurting them in the first place doesn't matter (an abusive mentality that dovetails very well with how the narrator of the Wings is treated by his partner), in fact the victim must now jump through hoops to prove that their pain is real and material and worthy of taking any notice at all, and there is a particularly pertinent juxtoposition to be seen between K Corp policy encouraging rampant self-harm among its staff and Yi Sang's mentality causing him to self-harm through neglecting his own safety. Dongrang internalised this lesson through the League of Nine's downfall, stifling his own pain even as it became a seething undercurrent of resentment, even as it motivated him to cast aside his old motives and morals in pursuit of far shallower glories. Then he saw it all again, all at once, crystal clear with nowhere to hide from it, and the weight of it all drove him mad with self-hatred. Yet after that, with just enough of his fractured mind pieced together again, what lesson did he learn? That his regrets made him weak. That his lingering sympathy for Tearful Thing, representing his lingering sympathy for all lesser creatures that he once adored, was holding him back. He kills the yellow calf in his mind and seizes with both hands the lesson that sorrow and regret are a waste of time, and the tears of others are good for nothing but what you can use. It's a different kind of sloth, the absolute indifference of one without empathy.

    Now let's pause for a moment and look at a pair of IDs.

    Heathcliff (Narration): My colleagues have died.



    Heathcliff (Narration): Three, five? Maybe six. The number doesn't matter any more.
    Heathcliff (Narration): They were killed by those wretched new technologies that won't stop springing up. One lost their job and starved, one got their flesh taken apart. Others worked like cogs in the machine, treated like subhuman junk. They were all diligent chums. I was thankful that they were good to a bloke like me.
    Heathcliff (Narration): ... 'course, I never showed it.
    Heathcliff (Narration): I was one lucky bugger. I at least didn't get swept up by rushing waves of technology and die. I ran off and roamed the Backstreets like a thrown away umbrella until they took me in... But I guess I didn't deserve 'em after all.
    Heathcliff (Narration): In the end, they'd all go away, like wet paper being torn away. And the regret and shame I felt as I watched it all happen had my anger boiling.
    Heathcliff (Narration): Maybe, if technology didn't exist as they said... I could've been laughing and fooling around at a Backstreets pub with chums that could've been alive.
    Heathcliff (Narration): So I decided to get as serious as I could be and ravage all I can this time for sure. They work on science and technology to make life comfortable, but those things end up taking lives. It's why I started thinking that things like those shouldn't have existed in the first place. Us survivors dug into the rotten remains of a fallen Wing that once stood at the top of technological progress, and put on what they called EGO. Products of technology we detested.
    Heathcliff (Narration): It's ridiculous to think that technology would have a mind, but it seems like this thing does. As soon as I wore this thing, cold and dark feelings rushed into my heart. An endless swirl of gloom wrapped around me. But as it did, I got the feeling that maybe this thing was like me.
    Heathcliff (Narration): Maybe, just like I did in the past... this thing once had a friend, but got driven out and abandoned. Thinking like that... Hah, it gave me motivation to fight.
    Heathcliff (Narration): It helped me take down all the crooks trying to protect their damned technology and drown it all so they'd never see the light of day again. That's not gonna bring my colleagues back from the dead, of course. At least I'll reduce the number of people that'll end up like us a fair bit.
    Heathcliff (Narration): But...



    Heathcliff (Narration): When I'm done, the chill reminds me that I'm alone. I go back to wandering damp, dark alleys... Now I can hardly sleep anywhere else.
    Heathcliff (Narration): Dammit, maybe this EGO thing will do me in one day, like how technology doomed all my mates. What a farce that'd be.
    Heathcliff (Narration): ... whatever. Thinking more won't give me any answers. Once I'm done with this job, I'll go back with pride...
    Heathcliff (Narration): Once the new world is made... I'll have another chance...
    Heathcliff (Narration): You leave now. Don't try and give me attention. I have no friends left now.

    Sunshower Heathcliff is, unfortunately, a shithouse ID. It was PM's second and, as of this writing, last ever attempt at making a purely reverse-coin ID (which is quite funny because when fought as a boss Sunshower Dongbaek had positive coin skills as well as automatic SP drain mechanics, two things Sunshower Heathcliff desperately wishes he had). They were clearly afraid of having another NClair on their hands, and so they sabotaged him hardcore. But we don't have to give another thought to the mechanics of Sunshower Heathcliff, instead appreciating how brilliantly apropos it was for them to give Heathcliff the Dongbaek ID. They, to return to our thematic throughline, have learned the same lesson from pain - spite. Dongbaek and Heathcliff have become aggressive, sensitive, distrustful, bitter, angry people who are forever poised to lash out at others for their perceived crimes. Heathcliff, as we know well from his literary inspiration, is obsessed with the idea of one day returning to Wuthering Heights to pay back every wrong done to him in his childhood. Dongbaek is obsessed with removing what she sees as the root cause for the collapse of what she loved, burning out the instruments of oppression by any means necessary. They represent the kind of pain that poisons you, makes you something barbed and sharp and calloused, that makes you believe that the only relief you will ever find for your pain is finding the right target to pour it upon instead. This perfectly aligns with the themes of Drifting Fox, the EGO suit's source, something that Heathcliff in his surprising capacity for emotional intelligence realises the moment he dons the raincoat - like him, like Dongbaek, the fox was betrayed and terribly hurt. Like him and Dongbaek, it just wants to snarl and lash out and hurt people to try and relieve the pain that it feels.

    But... that's not how we last saw Dongbaek, was it? It surely could've been, had Dongrang had his way. He might've pushed her over the edge just like he wanted and we might've fought Dongbaek The Withered Grove or something like that in that screening room instead. But we didn't. Instead Dongbaek heard Carmen's voice in her ear telling her that she could have the revenge she wanted, she could become a monster and lash out at the cruel, unjust world that had taken everything from her, just like Eunbong's owner did, just like Dongrang would eventually do, and she didn't. She was told that the world she envisioned was impossible and her efforts were in vain, her comrades died for nothing, and as she teetered on the edge she realised that it didn't matter. She could learn another lesson, make a difference choice. She chose instead to bloom, to become a source of hope for those who would come after her.

    Dongbaek shows us pain that teaches us to care. A world where if someone's arm is cut off the people around them will comfort them and learn to live with them, rather than racing to fix the problem and commodify the solution. It was something of a throaway line in there from Shrenne's email but it's incredibly important, a statement on the only way to live with pain and loss without ultimately inviting more. We saw it in action through Yi Sang, his creation of the Mirror and showing it to the rest of the League being an act of love and connection that never fully lost its shine even in the deepest depths of his depression. It was everything Dongbaek dreamed of accomplishing when she saw a black sky and made fireworks to replace the missing stars. In fact, we even saw it in action sooner than that, didn't we? When the bomb went off and the Sinners were scattered, Heathcliff was in agony but he begged Dante to save Don Quixote first, knowing that however he felt in the moment she must've been suffering even worse. The moment that made Dante forget their worries about the source of their power, stop comparing it unfavourably to the ampoules, and just Do It. Dante must suffer the Sinners' pain in their place to revive them but more importantly Dante cares about their pain. Dante cared about Gregor and Rodion, but didn't have the will to break out of their shell and act on it. Dante cared about Sinclair's pain, and at the very end finally threw caution to the wind so they could support him. Dante tries this Canto to proactively understand Yi Sang and learn about his pain, their misfortune is only that Yi Sang is awful at communicating anything directly and resents the fact that Dante won't let them die in the first place. But then Dante asks him the million-dollar question and sends his mind back to that moment where it can meet Dongbaek's lingering spirit - where she can pass on that same lesson she learned.



    Yi Sang: "So... is this the trespasser?"
    Narrator: "The child's voice was rather dry. With an apathetic expression and voice, he was looking down at the person dragged in front of him."
    Diligent Member (TLA): "Yes, sir. They might have been trying to loot Enkephalin from the facility... They came down to the underground alone."
    Yi Sang: "... I see, you may go now."
    Yi Sang: "Now... you may begin talking. For what reason did you go to that place?"
    Narrator: "As the fan folded shut, the captured one started arguing in their defence."
    Captured Thief: "A-Are you their leader?"
    Yi Sang: "... it does happen to be my current position."
    Captured Thief: "Look... I'm risking my life trying to earn some cash. It's not like you rented this whole facility to yourselves or anything, does it hurt to share some of that?"
    Narrator: "The child's expression became further unconcerned. He seemed almost puzzled by the claim."
    Yi Sang: "It appears to me that you may have a misunderstanding..."
    Captured Thief: "I'm not misunderstanding a thing! I saw that fancy lab you've set up here, too... What, I guess there wasn't any Enkephalin left here that you could pocket, huh?"
    Yi Sang: "That is not an installation meant for harvesting Enkephalin..."
    Captured Thief: "What else can it be!"
    Narrator: "*Shrft*. The child forcefully unfolded his fan, making his unwillingness to hear more of it clear."
    Captured Thief: "W-what. Now that I got a closer look, you seem strange. There are flowers on your head, and..."



    Yi Sang: "These... are bloomed things. The nostalgia in my mind for a certain time I would like to summon forth has taken form."
    Narrator: "Facing the perplexed expression, the child stands up and slowly walks toward them."
    Captured Thief: "Eek, s-stay away!"
    Yi Sang: "There is no need to fear. You admitted yourself that you're risking your life."
    Narrator: "The child didn't seem to have any hostile intent. Rather, he seemed as if his eyes were set on something far, far away."
    Yi Sang: "If I may ask... have you seen a proper flower in recent times?"
    Captured Thief: "... I don't think... I've seen any in person. Artificial ones were everywhere, though."
    Yi Sang: "Indeed... Technology has come to a point where it robs us of what originally brought us enjoyment and glee. One day... in our pursuit of convenience and expediency, we'd lost what used to matter more than technology."
    Yi Sang: "If it weren't for such technologies, you would not be living the life of a petty Enkephalin thief, is that not right?"
    Narrator: "The captured person seemed to be flustered by the child's question, rolling their eyes for a bit."
    Captured Thief: "No, but still... If it weren't for technology, I wouldn't be alive at all by now. My life was saved by some ampoule K Corp made once, even though it cost me an arm and a leg..."
    Yi Sang: "..."
    Narrator: "The child briefly contemplated in silence..."
    Yi Sang: "Indeed, you raise a fair point."
    Narrator: "Then he gave his reply with a snicker."
    Captured Thief: "What?"
    Yi Sang: "Although I happened to be assigned the position of a leader... my goal is slightly different from what they chant in unison."
    Yi Sang: "When an artifical flower was first made, when fireworks were first invented... the pure delight and joy of witnessing them emerge for the first time in the world. Do you not yearn for that feeling as well?"
    Captured Thief: "... you're not right in your mind, are you?"
    Yi Sang: "You may be correct in your judgement. Yet..."
    Yi Sang: "The path appears quite charming to me. And I felt my mind bloom wider than ever as I conceived that idea."
    Narrator: "The child's mind was clear and steadfast. It seemed that no one could dare snap it."

    Yi Sang's Spicebush ID is something of a letdown as far as 'season headliner' IDs are in that it has no special reactivity when deployed in Canto IV stages, against either of Dongbaek or Dongrang's forms. This is a curious oversight considering Dongbaek has no reaction to literally her own EGO being used against her, and particularly strange when the Cold, Fragrant and Sharp Illusion ego gifts in the Reminisced League of Nine dungeon boost the damage of Gluttony, Sloth and Pride skills which perfectly map to the sin spread of Spicebush Yi Sang in much the same way the three N Corp trial gifts mapped to NClair's. It is however still noteworthy for being the first ID to have access to AoE on base skills, his s2 gaining +2 Attack Weight when consuming 6 Tremor Count on himself - he was also the first self-Tremor ID, a slightly bizarre archetype that mostly exists to be Charge without having synergy with Charge. No he's solidly in the Sinking archetype, and in a very funny way at that - unfortunately I didn't just abandon levelling him at some point like I did NClair so he's outside of LP range to see any use.

    For the longest time I didn't really care for this ID. That is to say, I liked using it well enough and I thought it was fun to watch the funny fan move blow apart three guys at once or see a billion damage numbers from his funny s3, but the lore didn't vibe with me. I didn't understand why the Yi Sang of another world would just get to bogart Dongbaek's EGO so I sort of dismissed the uptie story and used him as a numbers man. But having gone through Canto IV like this again, combed through it all to line up in a row with context, I've turned around on it. I think it's wonderfully appropriate that the Yi Sang of another world ended up inheriting Dongbaek's ideals to such an extent that he even developed her EGO. Her dearest wish was to bloom and become the start of new growth, the first of many new fragrant flowers, and she spent her final moments trying to help Yi Sang realise his potential in our world. Of course she could transfer it to him.

    Which brings us, now, back to the main thrust of the analysis - the moment Yi Sang changes. He finds the strength to stand up to Dongrang, but it's not just that. He realises why he made the mirror, but it's not just that. He realises what it means to see what he longs for in the reflections, but it's not just that. It all comes back to Sang Yi, the idealised self he so admired and wished to emulate. He says something curious; "every Yi Sang sees wings, but only one Yi Sang can fly".

    The first three Sinners were prisoners of the narrative. Gregor couldn't even bring himself to try and push at its bounds, Rodion preferred to remain in the cold rather than walk towards the end of her story, and while Sinclair evaded his worst possible fate he was still ultimately saved from Kromer by Demian just as he was in the novel of his namesake. If there is a chance to be different, if there is another path to walk, these three couldn't see it. But in the greatest twist of all, Yi Sang is different. Yi Sang went through the same kind of crushing despair and emotional neglect that the narrator of The Wings did, he felt just as forlorn and hopeless, reduced to a thing living in a terrarium, drugged and complacent. When Sang Yi tells him to save the blue pills until he starts seeing different things, the choices he gives includes the very same one the narrator made - take them all at once, pass out, and wake up believing that all is as it should be. Yi Sang, alone, at his lowest point, believing that there is nothing left in his life worth living for and baulking at Hermann's insane plan for the destruction of mirror worlds only in how it will affect specifically Sang Yi, chose otherwise. He chose to walk until his feet ached and he was drenched in rain because deep down he still believed that maybe, one day, he'd be able to fly again.

    Canto IV means a lot to me. The first three stories were pretty good but this one, this moment, when Yi Sang used his evolved EGO and I heard that song, I fell in love with this story. I hate that Limbus Company is a gacha game, I hate a lot of the decisions Project Moon makes as a company, there are certain barriers I have to put in place to protect myself from the predatory practices embedded in its DNA as the kind of game it is and this has caused friction at times. But I created this thread to celebrate what captivates me about Limbus Company, and for that reason I must be honest about how deeply meaningful it is to me. Most surreal of all is how Canto IV only became moreso now, as I type these words early into a new year - when I started this thread I was the same age as Yi Sang (29) and now I am not. Like Yi Sang, I never thought I would live to see that age. Like Yi Sang I've spent a long, long, long time believing that every decision I make is the wrong one. Like Yi Sang I've stood and watched as something I believed would be everlasting fell apart around me. Like Yi Sang I'm probably autistic but neither of us have been diagnosed so we're just Quirky like that.

    All that is to say that the writing of Limbus Company gets it. Truly, honestly gets it. These people act like people with a kind of unflinching honesty that can fall by the wayside for the audience when the whacky shit happens, but it's never forgotten. I just want more people to see and appreciate that, whether they be longtime Limbus players who never read too deeply into it all or brand new people who are just here to enjoy the story. I want to spread the same feelings that stories like Limbus Company have invoked in me, in as many ways as I can. And doing that got me the greatest husband in the world, so I guess something's working out.


    Let's talk about some other Season 2 IDs now. There is no clever segue, die.



    Ishmael: "... Don't laugh, seriously."
    Narrator: "A sticky green substance was all over the child's body. No, rather than sticking to her... It should be right to call it 'draped' over her. This is a kind of 'equipment', 'suit', 'outfit' and 'tool' the child put on of her own volition."
    Narrator: "That's right. In the now fallen L Corp... or Lobotomy Corporation, in other words, they used to extract a type of 'tool' from Abnormalities. By drawing up the innermost core of the Abnormality... they made it possible for anyone to use their powers as tools whenever. In Lobotomy Corporation, they made two types of such tools, and called them EGO Weapons and EGO Suits respectively. Employees managing Abnormalities wore them as needed, used them to handle a variety of dangerous situations, and..."
    Narration: "Haha, that went on for a bit too long."

    Damn that's crazy why did the narrator launch into such a detailed explanation of LobCorp procedure? Don't worry about it, Ishmael's wearing the funny fat goo man suit.

    Ishmael: "Seriously, why am I the only one forced to wear this? Can't I put on one of those outfits with... the talisman things?"
    Rodion: "Shoulda picked faster, gal~ There were only three sets left, so what can we do about it?"
    Sinclair: "Reading the documents left here... It says only a limited number of sets could be produced for each..."
    Rodion: "See now~ I guess you could say you were destined to put that on, right, sweetheart? Fuhu."
    Ishmael: "Damn it..."
    Narrator: "As there were many kinds of Abnormalities, EGO could be extracted in various forms. It looks like this branch only managed a few Abnormalities before the burial. Perhaps it was a relatively new one that wasn't authorised for very long. They might not have extracted much EGO because they didn't manage the Abnormalities for long enough."
    Ishmael: "So... do we really have to use these to fight on? That security staff from K Corp... were they called the excision staff? I admit they're a pain to deal with, but I'm not sure if we need all this..."
    Rodion: "Don't wanna? If that's the case... go ahead and fight without it, then~"
    Ishmael: "Hngh..."
    Narrator: "The child still couldn't erase the unpleasantness from her face. But experiencing its power might have changed her mind for a bit."



    Ishmael: "Wow... this weapon looks so heavy, but it can be swung so freely, huh?"
    Rodion: "Hey... admiring that kinda stuff in the middle of beating someone down is... a bit off-putting, isn't it?"
    Ishmael: "I mean, look at this!"
    Narrator: "The child then swings the green blunt instrument horizontally. She wields it with the proficiency of someone who's used it for a long time."
    Ishmael: "... It hits just right! Hahah, let's help ourselves to some wine when we head ba-"
    Ishmael: "Ugh."
    Narrator: "The child covers her mouth to stop the sudden outburst of this peculiar manner of speech. Her colleagues laugh at the scene, and the child looks quite humiliated... but they have yet to know this isn't a mere laughing matter..."
    Narrator: "It gives the feeling that they might realise that in the near future."

    Okay so first and foremost the narrator is capping because Sloshing Ishmael sucks ass and I would sooner use base Ishmael because at least she has 5-8 speed range and doesn't eat all the fucking Tremor Count. Second of all I completely forgot about how much the narrator likes to yap about Lobotomy Corp, but seeing as I've never played it and like most Project Moon fans I am also illiterate I am unable to read any further into that fact at this time. Third, there seems to have been some kind of general SNAFU about the K Corp Mirror World that was changed at the last second, because when first featured in the extraction panel the ID used outdated art where Heathcliff was depicted wearing a Red Sheet EGO Suit laughing at Ishmael just like Sinclair and Rodion rather than just standing there Experiencing The Horrors (and indeed the way Rodion says that there were only three left certainly implies Ishmael is coping while the owners of said final three Red Sheet suit owners laugh at her). But this in itself is a continuity error, because Rodion isn't supposed to be in the TLA in this Mirror World! They removed this feature from the ID story tab, but once upon a time all ID stories were grouped together by their shared Mirror Worlds - the world of the Liu Association, the world of K Corp, the world of N Corp, etc - where you could see all relevant IDs you already had and which ones you still needed to complete the set. There was no reward or anything for filling it out, it was just nice to keep track of how many of that particular world's pokemon had been collected. Now when you enter an ID's full info page and click on the book icon to return to their uptie story, you see a screen much like this.



    ID stories sharing space on a screen like this take place in the same Mirror World without necessarily requiring all 12 Sinners to be part of the same faction, easiest to keep track of by how the Kurokumo Clan and Blade Lineage IDs (we'll learn more about them at a later date) have consistently shared a mirror world since launch. According to this screen, in this world Rodion is not a member of the TLA, but filling in for Niko as the head of the Rosespanner Workshop with Meursault and Gregor as her subordinates. Their uptie stories aren't particularly relevant to the discussion so I've elected to skim over them so rest in piss Rosespanner Workshop you guys were a total waste of time.

    Anyway since Rodion tripped and fell down a plothole let's take a look at the Red Sheet EGO Suit user who's still canon.



    Narrator: "A murmur faintly echoes in the room. As candlelights wave, so does the writing brush in the child's hand, imbued with red ink. The child ceaselessly writes red letters on yellow talismans. He's writing down complicated spells of wishes and curses targeted at somebody."
    Narrator: "Could the child have learned this art of thaumaturgy? Probably not."
    Narrator: "Then, was it the group the child belongs to... the 'technology liberation alliance' that taught him how to make talismans? That wouldn't be the case either."
    Narrator: "Perhaps he's making sheets of paper containing tremendous technology, aiding his group's terrorist attacks? No, that simply couldn't be."
    Narrator: "What the child did was simply fight a few fights wearing the EGO his group borrowed from the underground levels of an L Corp facility."



    Narrator: "However, the child does seem immersed in this craft of talismans and dark arts. Rather than putting on EGO and using it as a tool... it was as though he became one with the EGO... or the Abnormality itself, putting things in its mind to action as if possessed."
    Narrator: "That's right. Most EGO will try to encroach on its user and corrode them. It's said that uttering someone else's words as if they're your own and copying whatever they do eventually makes you no different from that person, right?"
    Narrator: "Then it may only be natural that using someone else's mind like a tool gradually assimilates yours into it. Forgetting your self... as if it has taken it."
    Narrator: "It would be wise to have someone else take the child's EGO off before it corrodes him further, but it doesn't look like the organisation he belongs to will be eager to do so considering the excellent compatibility and results he's been showing."

    Whatever Talisman Sinclair is suffering he deserves it all and worse, I hope he dies so I can put his body in a woodchipper, rip in piss, anyway-

    Okay but seriously, mechanically Talisman Sinclair is very very difficult to utilise effectively and he relies extremely heavily on skill draw RNG but unfortunately if the stars align he's the best thing for Rupture since sliced bread and still has not been equalled in peak performance since June 2023 so PM has basically been spiralling trying to run from Rupture ever since. I've been so annoyed the few times I brought him as an obligatory team member that I've sworn off ever using him again and I will not budge on this no matter how many absolutely fucked three-turn boss clears I see on youtube.

    On the subject of the actual story content, once more we have the narrator yapping at length about the mechanics of EGO Suits and Corrosion to the extent that it's literally all there is to the uptie story, Sinclair's mind is so consumed by the influence of So That No One Will Cry that he doesn't even have a word of dialogue. It bodes absolutely horribly for the future of this world's Sinclair, especially knowing how melty his mind got in Kromer-Faust's hands in the world of N Corp, but there sure ain't a lot we can do about it from here! He's not all the way gone yet, he's relatively lucid when engaged via Dante's tablet chat options, but the uptie story's implication that he spends every minute of free time shut up in his room drawing more talismans is very much maintained by them. Ishmael won't be far behind either, going by her outbursts in her own uptie story. There is no 'good' Abnormality with regards to cases like these, but I can't help but feel like Heathcliff and Dongbaek were pretty lucky to only be grappling with the funny hobo fox who just wants headpats.

    Finally, let's take a gander at the other side of the fence for a particularly intriguing little story.



    Narrator: "The child spent his days and nights in that glass tube. It was to keep him in the 'most stable state' as K Corp determined. In that coffin of glass, the child's bdy sleeps all the time."
    Narrator: "Until he's woken up from the outside, that is."
    Hong Lu: "Ah~ Hard at work as usual I see~ The ones that came here earlier left for lunch, I presume?"
    Excision Management Staff: "..."
    Hong Lu: "Have you had your meal? What did you eat today?"
    Excision Management Staff: "..."
    Hong Lu: "Not interested in food talk? Then..."
    Excision Management Staff: "Don't you ever get tired of yapping like that every day?"
    Hong Lu: "Ahh~ You're looking me in the eye at least~"
    Narrator: "Perhaps the researcher was taking a moment to regret pressing the button to wake the child up."
    Narrator: "Among the employees called the Excision staff in K Corp, those belonging to Class 3 spend all of their time outside deployment to missions in those glass tubes. Since Class 3 staff inject themselves with heavy doses of the ampule more often than most other employees, they're forced to live in those tubes to raise the compatibility. The ampules could decay them if its configuration is ever so slightly off."
    Excision Management Staff: "I'm just amazed you can blather on as soon as you get up... It's not just ordinary sleep, you're put in suspended animation."
    Hong Lu: "Well~ It's something I could get used to."
    Narrator: "As they mentioned, their sleep is different from what we normally think. Their consciousness is put in a state of total suspension. Even the subconscious thoughts that change in dreams have the risk of causing decay."
    Narrator: "Yet the child doesn't seem to be affected by its aftereffects; he looks refreshed, rather."

    Some people are built different, Hongler is built perpendicular, he's just at a ninety degree angle from everybody else. Look at his ass, he's floating in a tube of science go spending about 90% of his existence in a state of death-like suspended animation because his whole body might burst apart at the seams like a Cybertruck somebody coughed at from a distance of 50 metres if his ampoule compatibility drops a few percentile points and yet the minute he wakes up he's like "so y'all hear about the new battlepass this one has skibidi toilet on it :)" I can't wait for Canto VIII later this year to drive me insane about him.

    Hong Lu: "Haha, I can't go outside when I want to, as you know. How else can I relieve this boredom?"
    Excision Management Staff: "Seriously... I have no idea how you ended up here. You'd have landed in any other department if it weren't for your ampule compatibility."
    Hong Lu: "Mm~ I wouldn't say so. It was my grandmother who sent me here."
    Excision Management Staff: "Your grandmother?"
    Hong Lu: "That's right~ She told me to see more of the City and learn how the world goes."
    Excision Management Staff: "So basically... you got here by nepotism, right? And your... grandmother is someone with power. Is Excision really the kind of job to favour, though...?"
    Narrator: "Instead of laughter, the child replied by making bubbles. When the researcher looked up in a hurry to see what was going on, they only found the child smiling with his eyes closed."
    Excision Management Staff: "You frightened me for a second..."
    Hong Lu: "Huhu, I just laughed because it was funny. Well~ I don't know what my grandmother is thinking, and frankly I don't care~ But I do think it's not bad to try this kind of work."
    Excision Management Staff: "..."
    Narrator: "An alarm buzzed around the wrist of the researcher who was looking at the child with mixed feelings."
    Excision Management Staff: "Here's something to clear your boredom: you're up for deployment."
    Hong Lu: "Aha! I knew it!"



    Hong Lu: "Alright... I'll commence the excision now."
    Narrator: "Spinning his weapon around, the child rushed at his enemy. For someone who was at work, he looked exceedingly delighted."
    Narrator: "It's like he was excited to have new experiences."

    Hongler's K Corp ID is just plain whacky. It's nominally a Rupture ID but he has precious little ability to inflict Count (but what Rupture ID does at this point a-har-har), instead his utility is as a tank. Some tanks do it by dodging or guarding, some tanks do it by defensive buffs or offensive debuffs, some tanks do it by interception, but K Corp Hong Lu is the kind of tank that does it by being fucking impossible to kill. He has a +5 Defence Level modifier and only a single stagger threshold at 50% hp, and when he guards he sticks himself with a K Corp Ampoule which is a permanent buff that causes him to heal 5% of his max HP per stack at turn end forever. Unfortunately he will die instantly if he gets to a 4-stack but that doesn't matter because of his passive - when hit while under 20% he will simply lock in, put on his helmet and heal 90% of his max HP (so long as the instance of damage received isn't enough to instantly kill him of course). This is capped only by the amount of Ampoules he can still take as he gains 1 stack when regenerating this way, so he can Lock In a maximum of three times per battle for an effective four fucking health bars of overall durability. Throw him to the wolves and he will simply walk home and say "haha doggies". The story implications are of course also whacky as hell, you can just feel how fucking off-balance he leaves the Excision Management staff member with the constant yapping and the casual mention of his wealthy grandmother sending the nepo baby straight to the Science Goo Mines. There's been a few more hints of the Jia family's goals since Canto IV and none of them look good for our buddy Hongler.

    Alright, time for EGO roundup.




    Remember how I said it was uncommon for two Sinners to get EGO from the same Abnormality simultaneously? Turns out I was full of shit and it happens all the time. Here in particular we have something of a case study in the difference between risk ratings in terms of power, as Ishmael's TETH-ranked Capote variant is rather plain and no-frills, two Fatal affinities and an Ineffective, but still notable for being able to spread Wrath Damage Up to the team which can come quite in handy for Burn, and the passive giving her a global +20% to damage when striking foes under 30% health can be pretty handy considering just how beefy a lot of enemies are. Meanwhile Meursault rolls in at HE rank with a full suite of personal buffs, even more Burn, plenty of Tremor, and twice the coin power for good measure. Plus its passive gives +1 base power when he's targeted by 2 or more skills, quite common considering just how many of Meursault's IDs are tanks, and it synergises well with a certain elephant in the room we'll get to another day.

    So, why these two? What's their compatibility? Well for one Meursault the #1 Heatstroke Haver in all of Algeria maybe he's just drawn to it, but given the Brazen Bull is specifically modelled after a means of torture and execution while the EGO Suit worn during the skill animation casts Meursault and Ishmael as matadors I think it more implies that Meursault and Ishmael have both escaped far worse fates than just being stuck on the bus surrounded by psychopaths. They were at risk of being the bull, trapped in the proverbial brass prison burning to death in agony, but by a twist of fate and whatever skill they could muster they cheated death and escaped the ring to fight another day. Naturally Meursault's Canto is a long ways off, but I think this reading bears out well enough for Ishmael.




    AEDD, now here's an easy one. Shock Centipede's themes are quite overtly about torture and experimentation, in that the Abnormality is subjected to agony and torturous conditions in order to extract the optimal output from its lightning capacitors. Gregor is himself a product of inhumane experimentation, Hermann seeking to draw out the true potential of his cockroach arm, and Heathcliff? If you've so much as heard of Wuthering Heights you'll probably guess why he's synchronising with the lightning Abnormality that gets abused all the time. The connection only becomes clearer when you factor in his battlepass ego from last season, Telepole, which is a big angry purple lightning dog. While both variants are Charge EGO, the strange part is that Gregor's AEDD inflicts Spark Discharge which is a Rupture support status (and the passive expends his own Charge in order to pass it to the ally with the lowest Charge) whereas Heathcliff's is a more generally useful Paralyse and Gloom Fragility with a passive that improves his self-sustain by causing him to drain Charge Count in exchange for healing when struck. Given their usual themes I'd sooner have expected Gregor to have the passive of Heathcliff's variant, but hey I won't complain.




    Themes? No-brainer. Someone could have waved a copy of the Odyssey near you at some point and you'd pick up through osmosis why Outis would synchronise with the scrungly homeless fox that's endlessly wandering in search of shelter, snarling and biting at every perceived threat it comes across. Yi Sang, well we just had an entire Canto about it didn't we? The Drifting Fox stands as a symbol for the entire League of Nine trio and the ways they've been embittered by what they suffered.

    No, let's get to what's important - I got some pushback about calling Outis Sunshower mid earlier in the thread and it's time to explain why I'm objectively correct. Yes, it rolls a very very high number for cheap. It only costs 1 sin resource and 10 SP more than To Pathos Mathos in order to throw out a floor of 26 and a ceiling of 33. That's pretty crazy, I'm not denying that. It's just that to me 'big number to automatically win clash' is... basically every EGO. Like, that's not special. That's the default. It's only much more recently that we've started getting EGO that are much weaker at clashing, or even worse than a base skill would be, in exchange for far greater damage or some other kind of utility. When I look at an EGO I look first and foremost at its actual affixes, and Sunshower Outis is an absolute fucking dog's breakfast. Oh yes, just let me run my fucking Poise Sinking Tremor team, the most synergistic there is! Wait no I can't, it only Tremor Bursts on fucking crit, and Outis' only Poise ID is Blade Lineage Outis who isn't a real ID and will be shot in the face by Yi Sang Fell Bullet for morale purposes. Conversely Sunshower Yi Sang is hilariously strong despite its quite steep cost, as on top of having great Attack Weight (5, up to 7 at T4) and a whole slew of useful team buffs that are uniquely both same-turn and next-turn (something basically never seen again), it heals 15 SP on heads hit. "Now Zerban, doesn't that mean it only offsets the 35 SP cost to a net loss of 20?" you might ask.

    Nope. That's heads hit. As in, every entity that it hits will trigger the SP heal. As in, no matter how low your SP is, so long as it's above -45 you still have a chance to suddenly get bukkake'd by a 15 SP heal multiplied by the entire enemy team count. This is even funnier in MD when using the Rusty Commemorative Coin EGO Gift obtained from the Brazen Bull event, which reuses single-coin skills that don't kill an enemy - and most EGO are single-coin skills. Funny wet fox go BRRRRR. As a ribbon the passive is even relatively unique among EGO passives in that it affects the entire team rather than just the caster, healing all allies for 3 SP at the start of each subsequent turn. Now that it's WAW rank it doesn't even compete with Yi Sang's other fantastic HE EGO, Dimension Shredder, and the only downside is that it has underwhelming affinities for a WAW (2 Fatal, 1 Ineffective, 1 Endure) compared to the very next one/intended first one (2 Fatal, 2 Ineffective, 1 Endure).

    And there we are, Canto IV finally done and dusted. I would've liked to get this done before new years but I was absolutely wiped out, so I decided it didn't actually matter that much and I'd get to it when I got to it. These postscripts kinda take a lot out of me anyway, I really need time to let all the deets percolate and that process took longer than usual thanks to the sheer mass of Canto IV compared to the first three. Plus, I admit, after the relative difficulty figuring out Hell's Chicken I'm a little worried about the next Intervallo, but fuck it I'm sure we'll figure it out. Hope you all have a lovely New Year.

















































    Alfonso: "Your wish, as well as ours... are being realised to the best of our abilities as always."

    And with that ominous comment in the depths of K Corp headquarters, before the true Singularity from which the Tearful Thing was born, we return to the Sinners in their moment of triumph.



    Workplace pizza party, fuck yeah!

    Dante: <It amazes me how they can look so happy while eating out.>

    Dante steps out for a moment in order to "catch some fresh air", a very funny thing to say when they canonically do not need to breathe and simply tanked a cloud of poison gas in the literal first Canto. Clockhead may be immune to mustard gas but they aren't immune to their social battery being drained by close proximity to a dozen psychopaths eating what I assume is Korean BBQ going by the 'gogi' on the sign.



    See? If you look just past Demi- EEP

    Dante: <You're... I didn't even notice you arrive... How long have you been there?>



    Demian: "Why can't people settle for just looking? It should be enough to simply admire it, smell the scent, and enjoy the moment, but they nurture greed and obsession as they contain it in their sight, eating themselves away."
    Demian: "The mirror, too - it was first created for simple enjoyment."
    Demian: "You could compare it to a bag of chips with hundreds of flavours, for example. But then someone came up with an idea. 'What if there was a way to reach into that possibly infinite bag of chips and take what I don't have...? What if all of us could have all the flavours that way...?' "
    Demian: "It wouldn't be considered theft. According to the rules made by adults, anyway."
    Demian: "That, in fact, is stealing from me."


    Dante thinking about the entire core mechanical premise of the videogame and internally tugging their collar so hard rn.

    Demian: "Countless stars are in the sky. But they aren't all the same. If someone else saw them, they might have been nothing more than dim lumps of light. But someone who found the twinkle staggeringly charming took one of the stars... and hung it on a high enough place for everyone to see, expelling the dark. And the people would rejoice."
    Demian: "Now, here's a question. What will become of me who has been robbed by me, and the star that's now forced to illuminate the dark forevermore?"
    Dante: <I...>
    Demian: "The mirror your friends use isn't any different. That is such a cruel piece of technology."
    Demian: "Take your time with the answer. Just draw me a sheep later."




    Narration: He was nowhere to be seen, as if he returned to where he belonged. I couldn't even remember what I was trying to answer.

    With that ominous food for thought, and an even more ominous hint of a forgotten history he shares with Dante, Demian is gone without a trace. And as Dante is left to ponder his words in silence, just as lost and adrift as ever...



    ... the clock...



    ... ticks closer to midnight.

    NEXT STOP - INTERVALLO II:


    courtesy of limbuscompany.wiki.gg
     
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    • ZerbanDaGreat said:
    Oh yes, just let me run my fucking Poise Sinking Tremor team, the most synergistic there is!
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    Well, we've already got one ID for it in Sunshower Heathcliff (with Fell Bullet EGO)! And you know, we can probably also count Spicebush Yi Sang (with Fell Bullet EGO). And Gregor and Ishmael did just get Tremor/Sinking EGOs, to go along with their existing poise IDs.

    So what I'm saying is, since Sunshower Outis clearly makes any Outis ID a Poise/Tremor/Sinking ID and we can run Cinq Outis for more poise, this team already exists.

    Dread it. Run from it. Destiny still arrives.
     
    Okay but seriously, mechanically Talisman Sinclair is very very difficult to utilise effectively and he relies extremely heavily on skill draw RNG but unfortunately if the stars align he's the best thing for Rupture since sliced bread and still has not been equalled in peak performance since June 2023 so PM has basically been spiralling trying to run from Rupture ever since. I've been so annoyed the few times I brought him as an obligatory team member that I've sworn off ever using him again and I will not budge on this no matter how many absolutely fucked three-turn boss clears I see on youtube.
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    So, I tried to work with Talisman Sinclair for a while but then I saw the light and went "I don't care if it's suboptimal I'll just run Devyat Sinclair and not hate life as much."

    ZerbanDaGreat said:
    See? If you look just past Demi- EEP
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    Me, watching the credits (this Demian scene is a post-credits scene): ...Demian? Why is he listed with all the voice actor credits, he didn't show up at all, did he?
    Me, about a minute later when this happens: oh i see now
     
    NonsenseLurker said:
    I too hate the direction rupture is going (nowhere.)
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    This is objectivly incorect as burn broke down and is a smoking wreck that hasen't resived a update in ages. Rupture atleast still gets shit.

    Also Dante is the worst fucking commison artist in the whole City. Mortherfucker rather change head and say they got amnesia rather then drawing Demian their sheep commison. He's been waiting forever for it!
     
    ZerbanDaGreat said:
    Excision Management Staff: "I'm just amazed you can blather on as soon as you get up... It's not just ordinary sleep, you're put in suspended animation."
    Hong Lu: "Well~ It's something I could get used to."
    Narrator: "As they mentioned, their sleep is different from what we normally think. Their consciousness is put in a state of total suspension. Even the subconscious thoughts that change in dreams have the risk of causing decay."
    Narrator: "Yet the child doesn't seem to be affected by its aftereffects; he looks refreshed, rather."
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    I'm sure the explicit description of how Hong Lu is mentally different enough to not be affected by the suspended animation doesn't matter. It's definitely not like he's the only explicitly non-human character in his original work. Not like his jade eye — which is extremely prominent in the Uptie art — is described as the seat of his reason.
     
    Honestly Canto 4 is my personal favorite, if only for that finale. Yi Sang is perfection itself and I can only regret that he wasn't allowed to show it sooner.

    TLA continues to be fractally doomed. They're a catspaw for their leader, they're being set against a Wing, and they are wearing hidden time bombs (since no one understands Lobcorp's Singularity). Oh, and their only allies are the Rosespanner. Not even Chainsaw-Greg can save their asses from what would happen next.

    EGO are interesting but I'd like to note a few fun connections. Given Matadors are known to kill injured bulls I think it's possible that he resonates because he fucking loathed whatever atrocities N-Corp had asked of him. He serves both as torturer and the tortured. AEDD's coat is a similar shade as Herman's and makes Gregor look like he joined her faction. Outis getting Sunshower may be partly inspired by Odysseus's dog Argos. Who literally ignored everyone around him in favor of keeping vigil for his master's return.

    I'll hold my tongue on the narrator but dear god that is some high octane foreshadowing and absolutely terrifying in implication as well. Similarly Demian knows Dante from before the Clock! That seems important. Oh, and Damien claims The Mirror is actively stealing from him rather then merely the Mirror Worlds or their denizens. Demian seems like a really cool guy who I 100% trust implicitly.

    There's also something I'd like to note about the final screenshot but it involves the debut trailer rather then a later spoiler. So I'm going to ask for permission to confound on that. Given it has some....big implications for what might happen later.
     
    AEDD/Shock Centipede is also about carrying the violence that was inflicted on you forward and visiting it on someone else. Heathcliff's corrosion line is "It's my turn to torment you now… Need some shock in your system?!" while Gregor is "Muheheheheh… Are you the new test subject?". Heathcliff take is more in line in getting revenge on the people who wronged him, while Gregor is about becoming the same callous researcher as the scientist who experimented on him.
     
    Alatie said:
    ...Right does anyone know what those suspusious vague words in the after credits meant?
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    It's a reference to the Little Prince, who Demian draws a lot of inspiration from. What that actually MEANS here, we're not really sure. There's obviously a few theories that I'm not going to list here for the sake of spoilers.
     
    Alatie said:
    ...Right does anyone know what those suspusious vague words in the after credits meant?
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    Okay so

    In The Little Prince, the titular character asks the story's narrator to draw him a sheep; specifically, to capture the essence of a sheep in a drawing IIRC. The narrator does so, and the Little Prince says it's not good enough. The narrator draws another sheep. Still not good enough. A third sheep. Same answer. Eventually, the narrator gets frustrated and just draws a box labeled "Sheep Inside." And the Little Prince accepts this, because it wasn't about drawing a sheep, not really.

    It was about thinking.

    How all of this relates back to its use in Limbus has yet to be explained.
     
    My personal theory is the 'sheep' is related to Limbus Company, it's goals, purpose, and why Dante is in it in the first place.
     
    Also the ending reveals that Alfonso believes--self-delusionally or not--that what she's doing is still doing what the Tearful Thing wishes. Hell, that first line there sounds almost prayer-like.

    And to be clear, Heathcliff isn't taking the place of Dongbaek there--but just a TLA member that took on the Sunshower EGO suit since in this world 'Dongbaek'/Yi Sang survived.

    @ZerbanDaGreat Just wanted to tell you that during the recent event rerun every single unvoiced story part before it was given voice acting.
     
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    ertniter said:
    Also Dante is the worst fucking commison artist in the whole City. Mortherfucker rather change head and say they got amnesia rather then drawing Demian their sheep commison. He's been waiting forever for it!
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    Demian: fucking goddamn adults industrializing wonder and joy from even the most innocent things. anyway hows my sheep commission going?
    Dante: *uhhh... what?*
     
    I feel I've let down my following this let's play by failing to give any comments for a few updates over the holidays, but I can safely say, damn, Canto IV is something. It spends some time building up the questions, the unanswered void in Yi Sang's heart, the cloying pressures of the awful work and economic conditions of the City as they relate to the cast, and it takes some unnecessary loops. But the major sequences in the latter part are all harrowing and incredible bangers one after the other.

    Yi Sang's emotional turmoil was much more involved, much more lonely than my initial predictions for the foreshadowing; and though his depression and his loss are at the core of the Canto's direction, it was compelling and painful to discover how much the compromises he had to endure and the pains that made him miserable were shared with others all along, and even Dongrang had begun with far more precious and kind dreams than he had in the present, all of them grinded down as even their comforts were commodified or taken away. As Yi Sang himself descended even further into a position to be exploited at the command of others that didn't treat him like a person, believing himself to be in the least misery like that. Yi Sang's resolution to channel the wings of his potential, equal to every world's him even if what they possess differs, only strikes harder as the final note of hope in contrast to that.

    Excellent work covering this Canto of Limbus Company and presenting your thoughts. Thank you for the efforts!
     
    Dream Logic said:
    There's also something I'd like to note about the final screenshot but it involves the debut trailer rather then a later spoiler. So I'm going to ask for permission to confound on that. Given it has some....big implications for what might happen later.
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    If you mean the part at the end where it pulls back from the map to show the City's population ticker rapidly dropping in June 985, the trailer plays ingame at the end of the prologue and I linked it in the relevant post so it's well within the purview of this thread.
     
    I still say that sunshower outis is a good ego. Sure, its just a good clasher, (...except its not; you take the piss but its a competent sinking and poise ego both, even if the former asks for it to be used twice) but it is arguably the singular best clashing ego in the game,when ego is the big number button (its just a question of which big number it is). The ego that does the job of ego the best for the cheapest cannot be worse than good.

    Besides, it has a crucial aspect of having an extremely high minimum roll, which makes it reliable, and if you've ever ran yi sang sunshower into a clash where the only way for him to lose it is to land tails at +45 sp and the enemy to land double heads on a 2-coin skill at 0 sp and then that exact scenario happens and he loses with sunshower, you would understand how nice being able to guarantee a clash win can be. (or, as another example, how many times ive tried to use ishmael ardor blossom star only for her to immediately beef it and get half my team staggered). Plus, yknow, stuff like paralyze exists which locks your coin power to 0 and most people dont have an on-top minus coin ego to take advantage of this (or the resources to overclock into one)

    This is, of course, speaking from experience
     
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