Art Never Sleeps

Aside #1: remember English class? because I do, I remember it very fondly. I remember being taught that any argument you can make from a text is valid so long as you can effectively support it with evidence from the text.

I was also taught that using personal attacks or dismissive language against a speaker is not a counterargument against their idea! I've seen a surprising amount of vitriol against this theory and people who like it, so I probably won't be engaging with my own replies and comments for a while after posting this LOL. Just...be reasonable, and remember when debating that your beef is with the other person's idea and not with them.

Point #0: the meta-level arguments: basically, these are the ones that go along the lines of "it would be bad writing if..." or "it would be good writing if...". I'm setting these, even the ones in favor, aside for now because so much of what makes good or bad writing is YMMV (Your Milage May Vary, essentially people have different perspectives on this). Personally I believe Dante-is-Ayin could be good even if its the "expected" plot twist or a repetition of old themes because so much of good writing comes down to how its executed. Whatever the truth turns out to be though, I have faith P.Moon can write it well. Moving on to something more solid than preference and faith...

Point #1: the Lore.

...or in other words, the Sapling of Light powers that Dante has. That, in and of itself, is a solid pillar of proof that they are deeply connected to LobCorp Headquarters and/or The Library. Additionally, when they first start acquiring the powers starting with Hokma in Canto 6, the slot for Kether on the diagram is already filled. Kether is incredibly important because it's Ayin's floor in Lob and Angela's in Library, the Kether Meltdowns/Floor Realization are their respective final bosses to surpass.

And I'm having trouble finding the direct quotes now, but the repetition of Lob HQ related Walpurgisnachts also reinforces the idea of them having a strong connection to Lobotomy Corporation.

In addition, in Canto 9 we learn that the Limbus Company's goal in collecting the Golden Boughs is to graft them together into a tree - recreating the Tree of Light, which was Lobotomy Corporation's ultimate goal. Thinking from the perspective of Limbus's founders, who better to help recreate the Tree of Light than the person who completed the original in the first place?

Point #2: allusions to pre-clock Dante.

pre-clock was an important figure by the standards of The City. While this doesn't mean it has to be Ayin because there are plenty other important people, Ayin, as the CEO and founder of a Wing, does fit that bill. Hell, he's probably become even more significant by The City's standards now that his Wing has fallen and affiliates like W Corp are struggling.

pre-clock seems to be a ruthless person who might not help others the way Dante does. Again, this doesn't make it definitively Ayin, but again, he fits.

Thanks to Outis, Smoke War veteran who seems to have knowledge of pre-clock Dante, we know they've got a connection to the Smoke War. Many factions were involved the war but Ayin and Benjamin are directly responsible for starting it so LobCorp could supplant the old L Corp.

Point #3: Thematic resonance.

Imagine a spectrum of video game protagonists, going from complete blank slate player inserts to fully defined characters. Manager X (LobCorp's player character, whom the player discovers over the course of the game is Ayin with his memories wiped) falls close to the former end while Dante, who actually has no player input over their actions, is at the latter end.

While the two managers are polar opposites in this sense they have all of their major story themes in common! Both of them are all about memory and identity and how those intertwine; leadership, sacrifice, and the role of a Manager/leader. Bearing witness to tragedies, what you're willing to sacrifice for your goals and what you feel you have to hold on to no matter what. And helping your colleagues through disatrous mental health crises both because you care and because its the path to getting yourself out of hell too.

So I firmly believe that no matter who past Dante turns out to actually be, there is a strong, deliberately-constructed bridge of parralels between them and Ayin/X. People will accuse "telling the same story twice", I'll say "variations on a theme to explore different aspects of a similar story". X has no internal monologue and little defined character, so I'm very interested to see what a similar story looks like through Dante, who has a full personality.

Adressing Counterpoints #1: Personality.

This is the argument that goes along the lines of "Dante can't be Ayin because Dante is nice while Ayin is an awful person!"

Two things to consider here - for one, Ayin in LobCorp is an unreliable narrator. Much of what we see is biased or incomplete, or him talking to himself (X). So to some extent it's hard to say what is in or out of character for Ayin when so much about him is left blank.

Setting that idea off to the side for one moment, the other thing to think about is the concept of nature vs nurture - which is whether personality is influenced by a person's life experience or if it's more innate. This can be a very complicated topic, but for our purposes here it doesn't matter what you or I think, rather what Project Moon thinks. And we can understand this through the character of Don Quixote AKA Sancho.

Can people change? Don Quixote as case study of memory and personality.

So as we all know from Canto 7, "Don Quixote" the Sinner is Sancho, Second Kindred of LaManchaLand, after wiping her own memory following the tragedy of her Father and Kin. In the flashbacks we saw of Sancho we see how incredibly different she is from the Don we know - Sancho is gloomy, cynical, and serious, focused on preserving the Family's status quo from her Father's antics. We see that before being turned into a Bloodfiend she was in extreme poverty, and seemingly suicidally depressed. But after she drinks from the River of Oblivion and loses the memories both of that past and her afterlife as a Bloodfiend, she becomes the overly cheerful, naive, and reckless Sinner who often endangers the others with her sense of justice.

This shows just how much life experience influences personality - bereft of her traumatic experiences she has a very different personality. The way the Sinner Don personality develops isn't random though. In the past Sancho did have some interest in adventure and Fixer culture, but it seems her rationality and cynical tendencies, which are no doubt a result of her hard-knock life before becoming a Bloodfiend, held her back, whereas Don isolated from the world in the Lighthouse is excessively naive because instead of bad experiences teaching her that heroes cannot be real she has only the Fixer fiction indulging her optimism.

So that's all to say that Project Moon's writing seems to believe that most of personality is affected by life experience with a small amount not changing. Applying this to our main topic of the Dante-Ayin theory, it is very feasible that if Dante is another amnesiac Ayin, they could develop a personality that is very different from him because their life is different from his.

And if "kindness" is our main discerner, the real kicker is that actually there's some signs of kindess to Ayin. The first thing Angela says to him is "I remember you. You were a kindhearted person." Of course he doesn't respond well to this because of who its coming from and when, but there's every chance he could've been a kinder person before the compounding traumas of Carmen's death, the Head attack on the lab, the Smoke War, etc. On Day 50 of LobCorp he is shockingly nice, though granted he is talking to "himself" who just went through a horrible ordeal. There are also times when Dante can be a bit of an asshole, even to the Sinners, particularly in earlier Cantos when the Sinners were pretty disrespectful to them.

In short, the fact that Dante is more empathic than Ayin doesn't contradict the theory, because it is both likely and very compelling if Dante's kindness is a side that Ayin himself never got to express.

Adressing Counterpoints #2: Gender.

Or "Dante can't be Ayin because Ayin is male and Dante is nonbinary!"

Okay, if this is your objection, let me say that I really respect you for it, particularly as a nonbinary person and a staunch defender of enby Dante myself. But unfortunately I think you're forgetting one of the main points of genderqueer-ness, which is that gender is not innate and can change. There's nothing saying that Ayin's gender couldn't change, plus Dante is different enough in personality from Ayin that they could be nonbinary without making Ayin not male. This theory doesn't excuse deliberately misgendering Dante, nor does Dante being enby contradict the theory.

Conclusion

So when I first started looking into this theory I was rather surprised. Not by the theory itself, because to me it seemed rather...pedestrian as far as theories go, like it'd be the first one everyone jumps to and discusses before all others. Yet what I saw more than anything was a lot of scorn and mockery of the idea and people who like it - but, notably, not very many solid contradicting theories or counterarguments. The weakness of the opposing view in a way compelled me to try to solidify this side of things. For fans of the theory, this post outlines much of the logical evidence beyond just what we want to come true, for opponents, this is what your counter would have to take down.