Lord Hong Lu is my favourite bad end ID because the weirdness of the Sinners taking on certain roles aside, it feels so bleakly realistic.
It says "okay, the child whose kindness you let rot because you saw it as weakness has become an adult who has taken your lessons to heart, and will hunt down those who taught them to him, and enact karmic justice upon them."
And yet. And YET, Lord Hong Lu is a bad end for him. He's not evil. He isn't completely out of character.
This is a Hongyuan where he rules by fear, where the ruthless are killed, where Hong Lu himse is on borrowed time - but it's also a Hongyuan where children can play in the streets again.
He never lost sight of who he was as a child. He just... in this one world, took the wrong way of getting there, one where he won't be able to appreciate it.
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Isn't it funny how Carmen taught Ayin how to "fade away without a trace" and the only time we've directly seen or heard of him since he faded into the Light was in Angela's memories, with most of them being full flashbacks to things we've already seen, and one other line during a flashback that was new, and then one time when she heard him in the Light, with both of those having him labelled as "???" ensuring we'd not even be certain it's actually him?
And while Carmen has become part of the Light, she did not "fade away," and has been very much a recognisable thing. People know that it's her. In Limbus, the Dawn Office Sinclair ID has him call her out by name.
Ayin, though? Not a trace. Literally, he's only mentioned by implication outside of Walpurgisnacht.
So the one who taught him the idea of fading away is out there and being remembered, while he himself is just... barely a part of the narrative anymore.
All this brought to you by me thinking how frustrating it is to be an Ayin fan when Carmen is literally in both Ruina and Limbus; she has a Ruina sprite, and she has more lines out of almost anyone in Limbus due to narrating so many of the ID stories, and I just got struck with the thought "it's like Ayin's faded out of the story- OH."
Ironically or not, it also fits with what Ayin wished for after Benjamin left him - "I wanted to be forgotten like a mirage." And, well, he almost is. Oh, he has a legacy, sure. But the average person? Has no real idea who Ayin himself ever was.
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I had a thought earlier that I lost, and it eluded me, and I only just caught again, to do with Faust because of something in C9.
Spoilers below.
Okay so we see at the end in the stinger that the other Fausts bully ours and call her "Naive" and "Stupid" when we've seen her be curious and inquisitive, both things that can be mistaken for naivety and stupidity if you expect someone to already know everything, and they don't.
But what caught me was someone talking about how she acts with Hohenheim.
It's a bit of a funny joke how they don't get along. They'll consantly snipe at each other and belittle each other's accomplishments. Not that Hohenheim doesn't belittle his own accomplishments - we see in part one how he'll go "Who designed this? It's awful" and then Marton's telling him "uh, you did."
Faust usually gets along with other "smart" people, she certainly gets along with Yi Sang.
But then someone suggested that the reason she doesn't get along with Hohenheim is because he, in her eyes, treats her in the same way as the other Fausts do.
I say "in her eyes" because I don't think that he actually means to come off that way. If anything, he's treating her as an equal.
But... as someone pointed out, therein sorta lies the problem - because of how she's constantly being belittled in the group chat, Faust takes "peer review" and "not being treated as the smartest person in the room" as a personal insult.
More than that, she goes on the defensive.
She sees someone picking fault with her, and so she picks fault with them. And because she has come to expect to be mistreated, she does this pre-emptively, at that.
In short, what Faust seems to be doing is that she lashes out at others due to the bullying she suffers in the Gesselschaft.
All of which ties quite neatly into the main arching themes of PM that have been following us through all of Inferno - Face the Past to Build the Future, and Face the Fear to Break the Cycle. Currently Faust is stuck with her own fears quite literally in her head, and she's perpetuating her own cycle of self-harming violence all the time.
I'd go as far as to say that the way she feels this pressure from the other Fausts would mirror the way that Ayin felt pressure from Carmen, and Angela felt pressure from her role. Mostly the latter, however, as we see how Angela (very importantly, here) lashes out at others in order to make herself feel better. We see this both with how she treats Chesed in Lobcorp, and her entire reasoning behind the Library's existence and how she rationalises its perpetuation of the City's violence.
I also saw someone say that perhaps Faust will end her Canto not by cutting ties with the Gesselschaft, but by coming to terms with the demons she has to live with, while standing up for herself and her own individuality. I have to admit, I do like that idea.
And if we go by what's seen in that stinger, then it's entirely likely that they're going to try and make Faust do something she isn't proud of, that doesn't fit with how she wants to see herself, and isn't how she wants the other Sinners to see her... and that, in turn, would make her incredibly fitting for Hod's Will To Be A Better Person... and the fact that she'd need to find her own way of living her life would also make her fitting for someone who became the Patron Librarian of the Floor of Literature.
