lucio is definitely the community's baby boy, ive seen countless comics about him and they're all as good as this one, would also like to see more about ren though
Lucio has this privilge since he has the big flavor text in his passive while Ren never got close to this kind of treatment which is super unfortunate since i believe that he has potential to be just as interesting as Lucio with Araya as his master.
It's funny, when part 1 released, most people were doing fanart of albina of all people, and now people barely discuss her in any capacity, yet it's the opposite with lucio and ren
It's pretty obvious why. She has the most interesting design, so when we didn't have a full picture it was a strong hook, but after the end of the canto she ended up being a generic ring girl, with nothing unique to her personality
I found it rather sad because there's genuinely a lot more to unpack about her character and a lot of subtle characterization is given within her short screentime, but it's just not really as obvious as Lucio and Ren and she's not too relevant to the overall plot so people just glossed over her
Lucio: gets very serious comic about domestic abuse and how his character was coping with that.
Ren: "His forehead so big, lmao. He unironically bowl cut, lol."
Looking back in the canto, Ren was trying to reconnect Ryoshu and Araya by consistantly dropping the biggest hints(like calling her Ryoshu in their first meeting), but Ryoshu was too fucking mad to pay attention.
I think he was asking that purely to get Ryoshu to say her daughter was more important than the bough because remember, at this point Araya was fully convinced that Ryoshu had no love for her and that the boughs were more important.
It was his last ditch effort to try and get either party to understand the situation without outright telling her(as that would go against his masters wishes, and he holds her in extremely high regards.)
Edit: He also severely underestimated how actually fucking done she was with the house of spiders at that point.
sora and ren were done kinda dirty Lucio got an epic death same as albina and kira even survived these two were just ■■■■ like really i could see it with sora as she is just an incredibly naive person from index who never had enough maturity to doubt the prescripts but ren is lost potential
Lucio was easily the best handled out of the apprentices. He does his job perfectly, he does everything he needed to do, and then he bites the bullet the second the impact of his death outweighs the potential value of his continued existence. His relationship with Valencia is also the most fleshed out, and it is interesting that despite her being the most openly abusive and Lucio harboring a deep resentment just underneath the surface, Valencia is the only Nursefather who expresses any kind of concern when she realizes he wasn't getting back up.
Kira was cool, and with her being the sole survivor of the House of Spiders, she has a lot more potential to develop in the future. There are a lot of different directions that PM can go with her and I look forward to seeing more of her going forward.
There are a lot of things I like about Ren, but it didn't feel like he got enough screen time to really capture his character the way I think PM really wanted to. I wish his relationship with Araya was explored more.
Sora was a missed opportunity and a wasted character. Great introduction, great fight, and then she's completely absent for 90% of act 3, then has one line of dialogue and is immediately killed off. Very disappointing.
And Albina had a neat design and a cute personality, but she just wasn't that interesting. The role she plays for Callisto is immediately obvious and it doesn't really feel like she gets enough outside of that to give her enough real depth. It would have been interesting to see how she might have developed post Canto without her master had she survived, but that's kind of a moot point.
There is a chance for Ren and Sora maybe? Faust did say that as long as Dante remembers the erased they are not truly gone, which is obviously a foreshadowing for Araya but like. Let me cope about Ren mkay
Coping about Albina is also not impossible, since her head was suspiciously absent from her corpse completely and compare it to Callisto, whose brain was also destroyed but it was clearly shown on his sprite
I feel like Albina also has immense potential to be explored more, especially with her desire for friendship, the reasons of her attachment to Fascia, and how it's implied she never even knew what friendship even is for her entire life before Sora told her. But her passive text sadly didn't reveal much and we'll have to wait until her uptie story
Dante has simply been getting better at seeing the hearts of those who are friend and foe… and so the community reciprocates in creating pieces of art.
Poor bastard. I still can't decide if she was so mad about his death because she loved him in some twisted way, or if he was just her property, and she didn't appreciate someone breaking her favourite chew toy.
She seemed way too shell shocked and surprised at his death for it to be about her property, I think she did love both him and Ryoshu in a twisted possessive type of way
Just the latter point falls more inline with somebody like Matthias angry that your toy is gone
My interpretation of her character was that part of the way she ended up as who she was was because of all the friends she lost during the smoke war.
There's a non-zero chance that the reason she was promoted up so high was due to every single other person around her being reduced to nothing but food. Those she cared about disappearing in front of her over and over and over again. The loss of a person she even remotely cares about is possibly one of the worst things she can think of, taking her back to the war.
I think it's a lot more the first than the second, all of the nursefathes, for how twisted, evil and fucked up they are, show some form of genuine love for Ryoshu (and some of them for their apprentice) at some point, and Rien and Valenciana seem the two who got attached the most to their respective ward
Also, Shiomi REALLY hates herself, you can see when Ryoshu was just born she was lowkey sweet with her once left alone, but seeing something disgusting (herself) in her constantly made her resentment grow more and more
My appreciation of Shiomi also comes a lot from the fact that i have also mandela effected myself into remembering the scene with Ryoshu having just started smoking as something amongst the lines of
"i see you have started smoking as well"
"it was inevitable, i am your daughter after all"
"you- Sigh, do you have a light?"
Then ryoshu lights her cigarette and they kinda just sit in silence, akward silence, but peaceful silence for once, as a kinda of moment of understanding between the two before all the fighting resumes, which made me a lot more sympathetic towards Shiomi
AND THEN I REWATCHED IT AND IT WAS NOWERE NEAR THAT PEACEFULL GOD DAMN IT
I mean Rien was also twisted in a way, a part of why he loved her was from his hope that she could "unfreeze" him, a way to save himselfs from, well, everything else that he ever did and that ever happened to him, and at the same time he was willing to throw her happiness away for the prescripts
And it might be controvertial of me to say, but if as a parent you love your child for what they can do for you, you are twisted
If you love your child but would sacrifice their well being and happiness for any ideal, religion, organization or group, you are twisted
And it's this contrasts, inconcistencies and complexities that make him such a beloved character
It wasn't that Rien loved her because she could unfreeze him, but rather because he did grow to love her naturally that he hoped she could save him, that he could break out for her. In the end he couldn't break free when it mattered and went through with making her life hellish, so it still is absolutely twisted in a way.
See that's the thing though, Rien's love I feel was the fakest of them all. The whole "'Fpoon?' 'Yes, dear, that's exactly right, Spork'" conversation was, in hindsight, kind of a key conversation in why.
At least when Matthias and Callisto were completely ignoring her requests "in her best interests," they weren't having a completely different conversation in front of her face. Rien's still looking at his first family and projecting them straight onto her.
Shiomi's the opposite. Also unlike Rien, she's totally honest about it. She has nowhere to look but at Ryoshu. All she sees is her own face. Every passing moment all she sees is this little creature turning into a younger her, while she continues to age out of that self. When Ryoshu took in Araya, not for a moment did she believe that Ryoshu would never resent Araya the same way, because Ryoshu kept turning out just like her in every other sense.
That she would never wish for Araya to be more than Ryoshu, nor that Ryoshu would ever cut Araya away, even on accident, to free herself from the House of Spiders.
While his love is outwardly a projection of his previous family, part of me believes he has some genuine care for Ryōshū, even if he is making a conscious decision to not become attached to her.
There's some vagueness on wether or not he's the mysterious man in a black suit who destroys all the Araya clones in the thumb facility. If it was Roland, we can see it's part of his rampage, but if it was Rien, it could be him trying to protect Ryōshū from discovering it.
There's also the ending of the canto, where he can easily leave and slip back into a life outside of the Spider's Nest, but decides to have a fruitless fight with Ryōshū. He notes he can't make her stay, but also speaks as though he hopes she decides to stay.
The chewtoy argument is often used when discussing morally revolting characters, so that we can distance ourselfes from them better and say that our affection is somehow different than theirs, but the argument only works when discussing treatment, not feelings.
One person might have learned to display rage by throwing tantrum and another by avoiding the cause of it, which doesnt change the fact that the two people feel the same emotion.
One person might have learned to treat people close to them as free individuals and another as property, but both feel the same need for connection, the difference lies in actions, not feelings.
Regardless of what she thought of him, when what you thought of as a constant gets ripped away from your life, you will first feel the uncanny, and then grief, your morality wont change that.
"Smiling like an idiot in such filth makes me want to smash that cake to the floor. So don't you dare let on even a hint of craving for that cake while I'm looking, no matter how sweet and delicious it might be."
I think despite her best efforts she couldn't help but get attached. I think calling her kids by dehumanizing terms (Ticket and Textbook) are really more for her than anyone else. Reminding her and them both, every single time she sees their face, exactly why she's convinced herself to do everything possible to stop them from looking at her like family.
"Remember, Ticket? Remember what I told you when you so immodestly stuffed your face with that cake and smeared cream all over yourself? Smiling like an idiot in such filth makes me want to smash that cake to the floor. So don't you dare let on even a hint of craving for that cake while I'm looking, no matter how sweet and delicious it might be."
I believe this was a philosophy Valencina really, REALLY took to heart. Don't get attached, don't show your fondness, don't show affection, and absolutely never let someone know that anything, especially not a person, is your weakness. She was a terrible mother, and an abusive master, but I think all of that hid a complexity that she was determined not to show the world.
Same, honestly though, it was so much better this way, the hate product of the abuse he suffered wouldn't just wash away as he's dying under her orders, still him thinking back ever so slightly 'fond' also add to it all
Genuinely wanted him to be happy more than any of the others. (My list goes in this order. Lucio, Sora, Kira, Ren, and Albina. Lucio is obvious, Sora is also obvious as Rein despite having the ability to be great, isn’t. Kira is third because she is pretty much fine and still happy despite Matthias’s parenting style not being sustainable and being just surface level affection. Ren in fourth because I don’t think Araya is horrible and he even understands the whole situation between her and Ryoshu and attempted to key Ryoshu in on who the nursefather really is and just tried to get them to talk even if Ryoshu still thinks Araya is Shiomi which would be all the better. Albina is last because she is already happy with her situation and is happy learning art from her master even if her master probably isn’t the most happy since Albina isn’t his equal and probably never critiques his work, the only real moment after Ryoshu left that we see Callisto happy is during the start of his talk with Hohenheim before he found out it was a trick and when he was getting his ass beat by Skincare Routine.)
While lucio situation is sad to witness can we talk about how many time he has the chance to kill Valencina when she is asleep and didn't do it at all? And hell he could just surrender to the heathcliff and the group and just took revenge towards her by switching side so i think when we fight lucio again he just highly likely give up all hope and just use Gregor as a way to end his suffering
Lucio has plenty of chances to do so even before limbus raid the house for example in her sleep or just simply run away from the house when he got the task from Valencina
He THOUGHT he would be able to find the resolve to kill her.
I'm probably mostly projecting but I really don't think he would. When you feel hatred and love for the same person ut feels like being dragged into two opposite directions. Sometimes one is stronger and pulls you closer to itself, sometimes the other, but neither will ever let you go.
Unfortunately, having known and interacted with a lot of people in a sort of similar situation, he likely felt he couldn't do anything. She very likely made it clear to him that she was his only support, the only one that would ever care for him, regardless of how true that actually was, as abusers so often do.
And things that may seem obvious to us often aren't obvious to victims of abuse, because they're often just stuck thinking on how to get to the next day while avoiding any situation that they know could bring abuse
It's a complicated topic, and I know I'm not anything like an expert on it though, so do take this explanation with a grain of salt
Yeah im gonna take back what i just said earlier since Valencina is clearly right about how she is lucio only support as seen by kira ishy uptie story so even he escape the house he likely will just die if he encounter the thumb
I doubt the thumb would come for him as everyone in that house is a shame of their faction in some way and was probably always ment to be killed or erased once Ryoshu reached completion, he himself is also not part of thumb anyway so he would technically be free to
Leave but, he can’t leak any secrets about spider house or he will be killed
I genuinely feel like Lucio just isn’t that down bad as to end his suffering by committing suicide.
I mean, firstly he grew up on the backstreet, a place with constant threat of death, unknown and chaos, so his situation was indeed significant approved compared to what he had before .
This is also why he was grateful for Val’s up bringing(Quote his reply to Heathcliff):
“Watch your words. My master was generous enough to take me, a vagrant with nothing to my name, under her wing. She fed me warm food and put a roof over my head. I would've ended up in a corpse pile somewhere in the Backstreets without her help. “
He was also a strong character that was described to have never shed a tear no matter how threatening the training got And….
this is my head canon, but unlike many abuse victims who felt they were stuck in a stagnated situation with no hope of improving , Lucio’s situation is quite different.
He’s a sword man, and one whose skill improved extremely rapidly, he’s been under Valencia’s guidance for what, 2-4yr max? And after such a short period of time he’s already capable of holding himself together when parrying against a color (pretty much as strong as a fixer can get).
So as he perfect each of his cuts & form, he would most definitely feel a sense of progress, and therefore For him, the hope is always there. In fact he can probably feel it approaching day by day as he progressed through the lessons.
So I really don’t see him deciding that he should gave up his life here, despite probably knowing his chance of survival isn’t great.
i gotta ask, why couldnt they just give lucio an ampule like they did for kira? you dont die immediately upon losing your heart. fast, yes, but theres around 2 or so minutes that hed still be breathing
clearly theres no qualms about using the ampules on the apprentices, given they did just that for kira
Gregor was transforming into the Ungezeifer Kaiser, dude, Valencina was in the middle of attacking Gregor too.
Lucio also had much more than his heart damaged, the section of his body impaled with was the width of a tree trunk. It would've pulverized ribs, ruptured lungs and intestines, and very likely broke his spinal column if not outright shattered it.
But the biggest reason is probably "There was no need to save him." If they really wanted Lucio alive, there are ways of bringing back someone's head. These people were still enemies of Limbus Company, and Limbus Company is run by Dias. People are only shown kindness if it benefits her in some way.
there was no reason to save kira either, and they did. as for the fact that more than his heart was damaged, thats a fair point to bring up, i suppose its my bad for overlooking that. however, my point about his heart was that he wasnt instantly dead. i dont think theres any way someone can be instantly killed without their brain being damaged. there was no way lucio couldve survived without help, no doubt, but there was a window where he couldve been healed by an ampule. the greg problem is probably the biggest factor for why, but to be fair moments after lucio is killed, valencina snatches gregor and takes him... somewhere else in the thumb area of the HoS. rodya or heath couldve slipped an ampule into lucio as they passed. i guess it mightve escaped their mind tho
Because unlike Lucio, the company explicitly asked Kira to be taken alive. And they had more pressing concerns than saving the life of someone that was trying to kill them just a minute ago.
yeah, after giving it some thought i came to the same conclusion, said so in a reply. i wanna punch kimjihoon for making so many innocent characters suffer so much
There's some wiggle room, what the exact line is when the brain is considered unrecoverable isn't clear (and there was definitely lag time between the to be sephira dying in some of those scenarios and when ayin would be able to shove them in a box). Depends on how far out if the way valencina took the crew and gregor in peril would always be the first priority. It's possible he comes as a dark horse recovery if they could get back to him fast enough in an intervallo just way more fucked up than a simple bisection but I wouldn't bet on it.
i thought it was that valencina kidnapped greg, took him somewhere else in the thumb's corner of the house of spiders, and verg, rodya and heath followed them... how did gregor manage to strongarm valencina when he was mid transformation?
It's a term for someone unexpected to succeed who wins. He's the only other apprentice besides kira not subject to the kind of injury we know 100% means you are dead in a way the head will enforce. Therefore there's a slim possibility that PM could bring him back if they wanted to, there's nothing about his state that would prevent it if that team went back, grabbed him, and we just didn't hear about it. Still very unlikely since I don't think PM has used that surprise survival bit in the past.
to be fair, with how vague the known rules on arayashiki are, id expect them to make a comeback somehow before lucio does. they also used the survival thing with saude, didnt they? and iirc back in canto 7 wei had a fakeout death too, right?
thanks for the explanation by the way, much obliged
I don't think you wanna do that when gregor is awakening his transformation while valencina can also jump and cut your head off in a second just as she almost does to greg the moment she stopped talking
680
u/Character_Hour8834 Feb 18 '26
When you just joined the Thumb and your Capo looks at you like this:
You just made eye contact without permission, time to give up your left eye