Mentomori

​i’m a little miffed we didnt get like any follow-up at all to his abhorrence of prostheses. the resolution is “Sinclair decides he will never be like Kromer”, but he barely ideologically refutes her claims. he is VERY personally and emotionally motivated, given she murdered his entire family and massacred his hometown, and he does give that he will never hurt others based on his own beliefs the way she has, but he still has that prostheses abhorrence. it hasn’t gone away. the story explains his “inner darkness” as a proclivity for violence and sin, which, true, but there is not a reason for him to have that and they don’t very well establish his inner darkness in main story (really it’s only shown in ID stories). he was absolutely horrified when his family and hometown were destroyed, not a single bit of enjoyment or inner darkness featured. he didn’t think “thank god my family is dead” or anything like that. this may be a bad complaint, i don’t know. you can’t have a guy with inner darkness and not have him revel a bit in his family’s deaths and hometown’s destruction. because otherwise he doesn’t actually have an inner darkness, he’s just larping. does that make sense? this feels like a knitpick of a complaint actually. the element of his canto where it’s like, Kromer decided his path for him, i dont know. doesnt seen very Kromer. but fascists aren’t very smart or logical, and Kromer is a shut-in fascist given power. Kromer’s whole deal feels like they make her seem way more manipulative and intelligent than she actually is, which i also guess is the point, her fear factor was mostly Sinclair hamming her up (Demian “you gave her power over you with your fear” (paraphrasing))

i’m not saying i need to see Sinclair say “i will never be Kromer”, but at least if he could like, address what motivated him to help her. because it wasn’t ALL Kromer’s meddling, he did have motivation. fear of prostheses, of what his family had become and lost in the process of prostheticization. and i think they did incorporate his guilt and shame of having helped Kromer, but they do not really address that he nonetheless was afraid of prostheses and does see people with prosthesis as “others”, ft his question posed to Dante. Sinclair was Dante’s first awkward foray into Proper Management, and i’m pretty sure he feels let-down by their performance, but again we just haven’t... revisited.

Demian popping in was awesome, but Sinclair doesn’t comment on him nor Kromer afterwards, not after Kromer is killed or on the bus. awful things just happen to him, and afterwards, he doesn’t share or ruminate about his thoughts on the things that happen to him, unless its to be scared of basements or christmas. which i guess is part of his “i keep every one of my anxieties to myself” thing.

i feel like Kromer took up all of the canto. canto iii was more Kromer-centered than Sinclair-centered; she was the driving force and cause of much of the conflict, and the canto ends literally right after at her death. also Sinclair quite literally did not do anything wrong, there was no sin committed here i feel. i know it generally goes that the Sinners have not committed so much a sin, rather than their existence/survival is a sin (Gregor, Yi Sang, Ishmael, Heathcliff) (Rodya is different) (i haven’t gotten to VII and onwards yet). but Sinclair.. literally didn’t do anything wrong. even Dante acknowledges this. PM went the angle of “Sinclair allowed evil to prosper” but fascist rise to power, which Kromer represents, is realistically almost never an individual fault, but rather a communal fault. that Kromer was able to enact her ideology and slaughter the people of Calw, that’s a communal power. you mean to tell me it’s all Sinclair’s fault?

i understand that survivors tend to focus on their own failings, and Sinclair feels Kromer wouldn’t have done what she did if he hadn’t lent her help, but [edit because i realized i left this thought unfinished] canto iii feels more like an origin story for Sinclair rather than a breakdown of his sins does that make sense. i know the cantos are like “origin stories” but truly he actually literally didn’t do anything wrong

i need to reiterate i Do legitimately like Sinclair hes funny and forms a really good dynamic with much of the cast, but i feel like they fumbled with his canto and he has a painful amount of main-plot-relevance / imagery that feels unearned. like you can tell he’s going to be important because of The Sign + Demian, but he hasn’t done much growth or development to justify that importance.

Forewarning that I am a scientist and not a literary analyst for a reason, so I can't promise not to have embarrassingly bad interpretations here lol - hopefully not too bad, though.

In general, I just feel as though he hasn't grown enough or had significant enough development since his Canto for all this relevance and attention. As you've already said, he had barely any fault in what happened in his past, and we're encouraged to view his past through a lens of him "not being as innocent as he seems," except I feel like we aren't given anything that backs this up. If he's meant to be a character on the precipice of good and evil and falling onto one side, then we should see more of that! The most morally gray he gets is being disturbed by prosthetics. Hell, he still hasn't even gotten over this or properly addressed it, so the only real metric of character growth I feel I have on him is how well-managed his anxiety is (to his credit, it seems like it's managed pretty well now). Given all this, am I supposed to consider him a Sinner over his thoughtcrime? Because it almost feels that way. Like you said, he really does just feel like he's larping as some secretly evil dude, and he's not even particularly good at it.

I feel like he definitely has more resolve now, but his whole "sin" remains utterly unresolved and unaddressed. And for God's sake, when are we going to address the floating blue alien in the room? Hello, gayboy, what are your thoughts and feelings on this? I would very much like to know, and it almost feels criminal at this point that we haven't discussed this. He literally started kill-stealing in Canto 3, dude. Do you have any, y'know, thoughts on that, Sinclair? Any thoughts on what his grand designs are for the universe and your place in that? I just feel like these are things that should have come up by now and would go a long way in justifying his screen time and random hype moments as of late. On that note, I love Demian. Hope to see that weird bastard again soon.

And I'm so glad you mentioned his lack of a resolution in Canto 3 because, boy oh boy, do I have some things to say about this in light of Canto 9. To not spoil anything, I'll put this in at the end of the post, being as vague as possible. Proceed at your own risk.

Anyway, another thing that has bothered me more and more with his writing as Limbus has gone on is that I feel as though Sinclair's feelings on things are given way more gravitas than other characters. To be clear, I'm not trying to power-scale trauma here, but it's always been really jarring to me that other characters will sort of tiptoe around his traumas or treat his emotional state with more severity when other characters are visibly more distressed in the moment. It feels out of place in a Project Moon game, where we've more or less set the precedent that terrible things constantly happen, and it's odd that it gets treated as so extraordinary with Sinclair. It's as if the other characters momentarily blip out of the City setting whenever Christmas or basements get brought up, but not when the Great Lake or the Smoke War do. And he never even seems to be all that upset when these things do get brought up, and yet other characters who appear more distressed in comparable discussions don't get this same "Oh, I'm sorry for reminding you of that" treatment that Sinclair does. You're telling me someone just went literally catatonic from grief, but we're taking a moment to make sure Sinclair is okay (when he doesn't even appear to be upset in the first place) after we saw some guy with prostheses? What the hell? That said, confirmation bias is a hell of a thing, and I'm not immune to it, so maybe some of this is more universal than I think it is; I don't know. Those are just my visceral thoughts. I just find it odd that other characters don't seem to be handled with the same velvet gloves.

Those are my disorganized thoughts - hopefully it wasn't too bad to follow lol. Again, I appreciated getting to read your thoughts, so thank you for sharing!

!! CANTO 9 DISCUSSION !!

notes: awuwuwuu little prince line drop...... please dante please remember your days and times with demian im begging Please let memories return to you soon. demian's stupid mang on the right. i think demian was Super Uber Tuberculosly mad that dante and sinclair almost died but he was nonchalant about it. kromer pov. demian im watching you confront kromer whyre you trying not to laugh bro thats disrespectful as shit dawg

notes: demian's scarf wrapping around himself is really cute . The Sign. stars. +cracks / tree branches/roots across to symbolize the bough and sap of light and such. also the snake swallowing an elephant. because we're not addressing the elephant in the snake for another several years

notes: its bring your baby to work day and this is [pre-clock] dante's outskirts adoptable. babymian is here because he wants to be and they cant really do anything about it . wilted flower in his pocket. he has boo-boos because he kept trying to walk normally and would trip on his stupidly long scarf. its baby-unfriendly

notes: dante would rather die than be carried in someone else's arms. the concept of demian expressly being inhuman hasbeen haunting me (no heartbeat, cold, flat affect, visibly Does Not Breathe) but its pure fun headcanon on my part, hes probably a human being. the head would surely Get Him otherwise? then again he can bypass tcorp just fine...... so maybe the head cant do shit to him. either way, scary walking corpse demian . dante's flames here are like how their flames were in canto vi when they were going haywire