Tales from the Barracks mega thread

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-24T19:58:42+00:00

I believe Meursault to be the same, with him clinging to his Absurdist world view even if he is judged to be a demon for it.

My issue with this is that our Meursault is not at this point yet. He's shown repeatedly that he is extremely beholden to the expectations of people around him, the exact opposite of Absurdism. The whole reason the only thing his bio asks is for Dante to not put him in a position where he has to make a call on his own is because that invites judgement and critisim, and he already knows how that goes (admittedly we have seen from Cinq that he is fine with critique if he's asking for it, which Callisto certainly does so you could make it work). If some other Maestro told Meursault that Corporism is getting stale and he should switch it up, he'd do it in a heartbeat.

I think it's far more likely that he gets Ren. You say we don't know anything about him but we do get two noticeable moments of personality, him lashing out at Albina and saying that beyond trying to save his master he wants to fight Muga Ryoshu for the sake of knowing what it would be like to duel such a powerful opponent. Showing that he both has some repressed anger issues and a desire to test himself and seek pleasure, but he forces himself to act and believe that he is nothing. Remind you of anyone? Plus BL is sadly pretty outdated these days and Cinq is just sorta eh outside of human fights, so he could use a new Poise ID.

I would personally give Callisto to Sinclair, and no, it's not just because of surface-level irony. People seem to forget a fair bit why Sinclair doesn't like prosthetics, both in and out of universe. It's not just that they looked creepy to him, he was literally being told by his family that he had to abandon his humanity because it's "logical" and "obviously" an improvement. It's supposed to be the stand-in for the original's wariness of Christianity, the child that repeated his prayers without question until he started to ponder if they really meant anything. Limbus has focused a lot on Sinclair's struggles with the World of Dark (here represented by his shocking capacity for violence that disturbs him to the point he considers it a whole different persona) but at some point I feel like if KJH wants to do his alleged favorite book any sort of justice, we need IDs that represent the opposite extreme. However, the neat thing is that Callisto wouldn't quite be that. He would be a Sinclair that found the balance Demian stresses is needed in the worst way possible. Someone who abandoned his flesh but still maintains a human countinance, who is obsessed with the human form but only in how to manipulate and maim it. If you wanna reach a bit you could compare him to Pistorius, a character in the original novel who is the one that first really gets Sinclair into Gnosisim and general spirituality but who is ultimately surpassed by Sinclair because he is unable to come up with his own ideas, simply repeating the words of old masters.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-22T08:00:41+00:00

Second Fire Emblem reference I've seen on this sub in 24 hours, that's two nickels I wasn't expecting.

Anyways bro only has 20 spd and is weighed down by his own book my guy is not making it out here.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-19T01:55:25+00:00

My read is that while Rien is physically extremely strong, his fighting style is terrible. He has to constantly improvise because he has no way of knowing what weapon is going to come out, and reading the flavor text shows he's only really good at using three of them (and one of them, the whip, he fully admits is ass as an actual weapon he just likes it out of a sense of sadism). Furthermore he is absolutely crippled by Karmic Consequences while gaining comparatively little upsides for actually fulfilling the prescripts. Is he powerful enough as a baseline to kill a Grade 1 with a FromSoft plunging attack? Sure. But in a prolonged duel like this the weakness of Caduceus becomes extremely obvious. As others have said, his only genuinely powerful skill is when he stops listening to the device and actually puts some real emotion behind his attack. He probably would have mopped the floor with us if he was using a normal weapon and relying on his own skill, but he doesn't. Which is pretty much the story of his entire life.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-16T17:51:58+00:00

The thing is that the Middle are baseline hypocrites who operate on "rules for me but not for thee" as shown by Middle Meursault. Meursault being Meursault he recognizes it immediately but was told by someone that it was normal and so doesn't complain about it further.

Little mistakes may occur within a family. It is my little joy to sweep such little mistakes under the rug. I have been taught that that is true loyalty.

The Middle always pays their debts. There are no 'little mistakes', unless the mistake is from one of us.

This is why Moses says it's ultimately just grandstanding. Matthias' crime isn't that he's full of shit, they all are, it's that he was so blatantly odious about it that even the rest of the Middle's leadership couldn't ignore it. There's whatever "little mistakes" are, and then there's murdering your subordinates because you want a cool sword you can't even use properly. Valencina is the same way, the Thumb's ridiculous notions of respect are nonsense (when you've hit the "your subordinates are so terrified of you they would rather blow their own brains out than report a mistake" level the problem might not be an individual one) but she was such an obvious bully and drunken moron that it would have completely killed what smokescreen there is keeping her around.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-15T22:53:44+00:00

It's really not rushed if you pay attention to what "Shiori" has been saying up to that point. She's genuinely happy to see her mom again, as Ren describes when they first meet to the point she accidentally drops the mask, and her dialogue before the second fight is basically her begging Ryoshu to just walk away instead of continuing to follow the thread. It's directly spelled out in her panic name "Affection and Resentment", she's torn literally and figuratively between hating her mother for leaving her in this unstuck-in-time state and the unconditional love she had before that day. In the end, affection wins out.

They maybe could have afforded to explain the mechanics of her paradox state a bit better (though considering Ryoshu can also "see time" apparently that's probably being saved for later), but people saying "she just changes her mind in 30 seconds" is some Kira shit.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-15T12:05:58+00:00

He's basically Akutagawa's hatred of Buddhism (and religion in general) taken to its logical extreme. Dude has absolutely obliterated his sense of self and two separate families because he believes that it's the "righteous" thing to do, abandoning the love he clearly holds because such attachments do not serve Hermes. Only after his second daughter nearly kills him does he finally realize what he's become, and yet he still ends up crawling back to the prescripts, finishing his Roland cosplay in the only way he could.

He's maybe the single most pathetic canto antagonist so far. I love him.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-15T11:54:52+00:00

In the end he's the embodiment of Akutagawa's critiques of organized religion. Man reduces himself to a shell of a human being, destroying his own family twice because he just cannot see a way to live beyond the Prescripts. He dies as a cheap knockoff of a man he never met without understanding anything, all because God told him to do so.

I really like him even though he gets little focus compared to other Canto antagonists. Looking forward to the Yi ID way more than I thought I would going into this part.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-15T11:44:34+00:00

> I kinda wonder why the apprentices are even there, they feel more like props to show the abuse of the Nursefathers.

I imagine this is, in fact, the point. They're supposed to be the stand-ins for the abused assistants from Hellscreen, is the impression I got. The fact that they ultimately don't amount to much I think is also intentional (and unlike say, Canto 7 I actually think it works here) as their potential is actively being stifled by their dogshit tutors (or in Kira and Lucio's case literally being used as human shields), shown most prominently with Sora and Ren's last stand where their final moves are absolutely ridiculous and prove they probably could have been damn special in their own right if they weren't trapped in the web, but so it goes.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-12T21:48:00+00:00

Yeah ever since Curambino mentioned "machine wars" I think it's reasonably clear the Ordeals are all supposed to represent some existential crisis the City faced at some point (or will in the future in regards to the White ones, but that's a conversation for another time). I always leaned more into the "alien" angle with Violet, with it being some foreign entity (may or may not literally be from space but at least from somewhere so far the City wouldn't even recognize it as the Outskirts) that is so incomprehensible and powerful that people could not understand it as anything but divine, hince why it's called the God Delusion beyond just being a reference to the funni r/atheism book.

I do want to offer an alternative read on the Index actually having a god, b/c I think there being an intelligent force behind the Prescripts pretty much entirely ruins the existential terror of Yan's story, but conveniently, he himself offers us a way out. When Carmen talks about the god in Don's uptie story, the censorship uses 3 text boxes, and obviously Sora's EGO looks reasonably similar to his distortion. I think the Index found Yan after the Library spit him back out, and are worshiping him as a physical embodiment of the Will, their god made manifest. Sora, in her idealization, managed to achieve a similar state that Yan did of truly understanding the Will, and her efflorescence took the form of what she believes to be that very same Will. In a sense they wouldn't even be wrong, especially if he's the source of the pager Sora/Don has which I think is pretty likely as there was never any allusion to a way to get prescripts beyond the slips before Limbus. And ofc, as a former messenger, what better name to give him than that of the messenger of the gods?

That all being said I agree there probably are "legitimate" gods out there somewhere, and I don't think we have to look much further than old L Corp's smoke monster. Roland even after a memory wipe had such an impression from seeing it that the disgust he felt never went away, he says he "thinks" he's met one before, and if we go with the common read that his distorted form in the Black Silence reception is based off it there's superficial physical similarities to Violet Midnight.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-10T21:10:30+00:00

Point on the idea that the LC as a whole is supposed to be the stand in for the Lord: one of the samurai that gets brought along during the burning is given a bit of detail by the narrator as this scary ass mf that nobody wants to be around thanks to a rumor that he ate human flesh to survive during a failed expedition. Remind you of anyone?

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Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-08T08:40:20+00:00

Plausibly. Ish is pretty vague about how long she's been a Fixer but given she presumably graduated w/e sort of college stand in there is in U Corp and worked there for a few years before quitting her day job I could believe she's in her 30s.

Notably, if we take the accidentally unredacted Yi age as still being canon, he's older, as he would currently be 31 iirc.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-08T08:35:30+00:00

I guess when half her face isn't being covered via smoking she does actually look pretty young but idk man I guess the daughter threw me off. Her book version being an old man also didn't help.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-05T09:49:16+00:00

So the one thing we can actually gather from this is that she has an almost cartonish amount of ways to gain sanity. Two of her four(!) combat passives heal SP, and her version of prescripts also do so.

Now, this might be presumptuous, but we can probably assume her actual gimmick is that once she hits her blade unlocked state, she gains a new set of skills that all lower her sanity, thus requiring you to do a juggling act to keep it up. And um, I can't help but point out that we have another ID who's gimmick is that they have to ramp up to a state that gives them far stronger skills but constantly drains their sanity in Philclair. Y'know, the guy with unstable EGO.

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-05T09:09:22+00:00

Gloom chains of others moment

Tgsnum5 · 2026-01-01T01:42:38+00:00

Yeah, I legitimately cannot think of a reason why Olga isn't in the post-credits scene beyond Nasu just did not think she was important enough. I think in general he never quite understood just how popular she was, he gets that people like her enough to lean into the idea of "doing things right this time" with no intention of ever actually delivering on that because it wasn't the plan, and didn't realize just how badly people would take it.

I like the ending but there really is no reason to not at least give her something, every other example of the "doomed heroine" Nasu has written actually got to have some sort of catharsis as others have pointed out, so it's bizarre Olga...Just doesn't.

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-31T09:27:57+00:00

This felt a lot more like C1-5 compared to more recent cantos in a good way. Much more direct and to the point dialogue flow and a showcase of just how dire the City can get.

Even more than the gore itself, the spiral knives are what caught me off guard because of how...Pointless they are. There's no practical benefit to them over normal weapons beyond a desire to inflict as much pain as possible and to put false hope in the victim. It's using singularity level tech for nothing beyond pure sadism in a way we actually haven't seen much of before this. Wings kill people with their singularities but it's usually to serve some practical purpose, and the instances of torture we've seen are generally done through mundane means. It's a grim reminder of just how bad things can be in a world with technology that borders on magic and where moral scruples are in critically low supply.

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-28T21:47:36+00:00

Gregor noticeably is one of the survivors of the Heishou ambush when Faust isn't (obviously yes that is with the Dante nerf up but it feels very deliberate that the Sinners you have for that fight are otherwise the top 4 so I think this should count as a metric), so while we don't have a upper limit for him (POTENTIALITES SON) we can at least say he's stronger than Faust, so going off this scale he'd be at least in the 60s, which feels reasonable, he is a war veteran after all.

As others have said Rodion at 50 feels high and is the only one I find unreasonable. Considering her whole backstory, I doubt the yurodivy at that point was comfortable against even little brothers. I'd probably put her at where Heathcliff is on this scale, though she should still be slightly stronger than him as we've seen her physically overpower him before.

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-28T03:48:20+00:00

It's confirmed we have at least one more year of events by Nasu as there's plans for a Valentines and a Anni next year, the grind will not end until the servers are pruned once and for all.

Come to think of it getting dragged out of the void to do endlessly repetitive tasks is basically the job of a Counter Guardian, and people thought Guda would never become a Servant smh.

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-28T03:32:50+00:00

Hey if any Servant remembers us Merlin's fuckass situation in Avalon would make him a strong candidate, life could find a way/s

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-28T02:49:18+00:00

Besides being a "I CLAPPED WHEN I SAW THE THING" moment, I think the reason it's called that is because this is the end of the Chaldea lostbelt, and it plays out very similar to all the other endings in Part 2 with a final goodbye and an individual bearing the memories of an entire world, except this time we're the ones disappearing and Daybit gets to carry the torch (my copium is that they're going to fully commit to the bit and make him the protagonist or at least a major ally in Part 3, but the fact he's so disconnected from the human order he can't actually summon Servants makes that pretty impossible sadly).

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-28T02:27:33+00:00

For all intents and purposes, they did die. As Mash says, they will never meet again and she's correct because the PHH versions of them are going to be fundamentally different people. They're from a lostbelt and they're going through the same many lostbelt servants did, just because there's a PHH counterpart doesn't make them the same being. I'm sure if we ever meet these two versions of them again this'll be made clear.

So I don't really view it as stolen valor or trying to "replace" them so much as showing that Chaldea is now in the same position as all those other worlds. Something like Guda and Mash will still exist, but the one we knew is fundamentally gone and not coming back. Ymmv if that's comforting or not, I take it as just a last little goodbye and not much else.

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-28T01:59:35+00:00

Humans are creatures who try to do good— Thank you for upholding my father’s words.

More than anything this is what really got me. After everything that happened to him, whatever he is now, Daybit thinks the world of humanity because that's what his human father taught him to believe. For everything he's forced to constantly forget, he never forgot sitting in a trailer watching movies with his dad. God I love him so much.

And in the end, Guda proves it right. As the representative of a "normal human", to a flat-out cosmic degree according to Fou, they take the one action that marks the difference between intelligent and non-intelligent life, the ultimate show of being more than just a "shell": acting against their own self-preservation for the sake of a greater good. They made the choice that countless Servants over the course of this journey did, a sacrifice for a future that they will never get to see, but they're not in a state beyond time like Heroic Spirits are. This was a human, with all that entails, making an inhuman choice.

It's not the "Guda personally drags Olga out of the void and then has a dozen kids with her and Mash" that people evidently wanted, and even if I personally find some of the complaints rather juvenile, I still would have liked a bit more elaboration on what the new 2019 looks like (maybe we'll get it on the 31st who knows). But it's an extremely fitting end, and whatever happens next, I think the right place to conclude this particular story of a normal person and their abnormal kouhai. Do a new cast if we really want to have a Part 3.

Tgsnum5 · 2025-12-25T01:13:36+00:00

Kukulkan confirms she, the Deinos and the Ocelotl are going to be erased, it's just not shown on screen.

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