Tear Jerker / Library of Ruina

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

The drawback of being human is that you can feel pain...

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• This is one of those games where your whole goal is to ruin lives and cause havoc in a City that is already a Dystopia where people are literally insane and living in constant suffering. However, many of the guests are shown to be nothing more than people with vulnerabilities, feelings, lives or moral codes. And despite that, that you have to kill them (or put into limbo). Originally for Angela's goal to become human, but it is eventually revealed the events were being manipulated for a completely different goal... by Carmen, the once beloved scientist of Lobotomy Corporation, twisted into the Eldritch Abomination following the events of the previous game. While the Librarians didn't feel sorry for their actions, the player themselves is likely to feel empathy for the Guests, to the point that it is not uncommon for fans of this game to Root For the Empire.
• Lulu, from one of the early stories is lucky enough to escape the Library, but her colleague and Implied Love Interest Mars is left behind and killed. Knowing that Mars was gone for good, she breaks down in the rain over his loss and makes the rash decision to return to try and reclaim his Book from the Library - an act that ends with her being killed and "Booked", just like he was.
  • Mars himself is quite tragic too. The son of a legendary Fixer, he grew up with a dream to become just like his mother and make her proud. But he found himself struggling to achieve this goal, and eventually ended up working as a lower Grade fixer. His mother was still proud of him, and excited for him to work his way up the ranks, but Mars felt like he'd failed her and his key page text implies he may have distanced himself from her out of shame. When he's defeated in the Library, Mars is the first person to drop an Objet d'art Key Page - the highest ranked and most powerful class of page you can get. While it's appropriate for early game, and pales in significance to later ones, the fact he has an Objet d'art page suggests he was much more talented than he gave himself credit for, and it's likely his own high expectations of himself ended up crippling his self-confidence.
• Poor Phillip. While in any other game Phillip would make an excellent protagonist, in here he translates to one of the most tragic and broken people in the game.
  • Phillip wasn't a brave and upfront fighter at the start and works alongside Yuna, a woman that he adores, and Salvador, an experienced veteran of the Smoke War who mentors him. Salvador is fairly kind to Phillip, but despite his affections for Yuna, she doesn't perceive him as a worthy combatant because of his more cowardly tendencies, and is fairly critical of him before of them. This is heavily implied to lead to him believing that Yuna was romantically interested in Salvador. Salvador promised to console Phillip after they were done in the Library, but he and Yuna were tragically killed instead. Phillip then contacted Dawn Office's sister office for help, but everything ended in exactly the same way, which caused him to manifest a brimstone E.G.O. Oscar implanted an escape button onto Phillip only for the button to teleport him into the 8 O' Clock Circus where the Ringmaster tortures him verbally. Pluto arrives to the Circus, transforms him into a new Distortion with the help of an unknown force heavily implied to be Carmen, and sends him into the Library, only for the Library to spare him. He flees, wrecks massive havoc in a Nest where his former office is at...and was finally recruited by Oswald, Pluto and Argalia into his ensemble, turning himself from an Anti-Distortion Fixer Office into a force of terror.
  • The implications of the Crying Children episode has a Fridge Horror tint to it. While not explicitly stated, it's implied that the Library altered Oscar's escape button just to make sure he gets tortured and distorted, and spared him because it wants the elites of an influential entity all baited out and booked. All in all it just proves how nasty the Villain Protagonist of the game is.
• Tomerry. A couple initially known as Tommy and Merry boarded their first WARP Train to go on a trip together, but ended up being one of the first victims of the Reverberation Ensemble's lunacy. They were manipulated by a modified Elena and Jae-Hon into becoming a monstrosity for the sake of escaping the WARP Train, not knowing that W Corp's singularity will instantly undo the suffering of the whole train once the journey is completed. This did not end well for the two of them, as was revealed in the Leviathan comic: after the true ending of the Library of Ruina the two were still roaming at large as a combined monstrosity hivemind with know sense of self, now taken under Iori's wing.
  • It says a lot that Angela takes pity of them and discreetely tries to make them remember their past lives. After the Love Town reception, she tries to reassure herself that she's not like Tomerry because, unlike them, she survived her own ordeal back in L Corp; but her tone of voice betrays that she doesn't really believe what she's saying, and that she's on the verge of a breakdown.
• Angela herself might seem to be quite the dangerous and despicable individual, but as we go further into the floor's development, what happened to her could be heartbreaking.
  • It was revealed that Angela was created by Ayin based on his lost lenore, Carmen, but noticing that she doesn't act anything like her he barely even treated her like a person. However, instead of ignoring her, he forced her into enabling as many outrageous and bloodthirsty acts as he could, namely the Welfare Team Incident, telling her to kill Benjamin to have him manage the time cycles, and deliberately inducing Sephirah Meltdowns. However, Angela isn't a puppet, and she has free will, leaving her extremely dejected at the end and she decided to undo all of her master's work in an instant so she could regain humanity with the "One Perfect Book", and she came out from the other side completely ready to kill just like Ayin himself. Ayin might had been done numerous monstrous acts demonstrated by the player of Lobotomy Corporation, but this must be one of the worst.
  • And much later on, if Hokma's words were to be taken as granted, then the whole Library and "One Perfect Book" thing isn't her idea to begin with...and she's still nothing short of a puppet and an Unwitting Pawn in Carmen's hands. While it's not really clear if Carmen was really altruistic in mind or she's a master manipulator with supernatural powers who intends to destroy the City, every single person you book and (seemingly) kill wasn't for Angela, it was for the unknown, shady entity who often presents herself to be too good to be true.
• Lesti's story is one that's easy to feel bad for. She grew up in District 23 of the Backstreets, having to work her ass off just to climb the rings of society until she was finally able to live inside of a Nest, getting a fairly nice job at W. Corp as a member of a WARP Cleanup Crew, the job even suiting her since being raised in District 23 meant she was used to seeing the sorts of horrific things that happen on a WARP train. Then her the first train she's assigned to ends up being Lovetown, and her crew is forced to go to the Library. Even if she's helping keep the horrors of the WARP trains undercover, seeing her literally burst into tears because she has to enter the Point of No Return that is the Library makes her very empathetic.
• Poor, poor Yan. As the Messenger of the Index, he hated the Prescripts that he was tasked to give out as those same Prescripts had forced him to kill both his friends and family, and had been secretly writing his own Prescripts as an act of rebellion against the Index in his own time. After much time spent fighting the Prescripts with his own false ones, he's soon told that his fellow Proxies knew they were fakes, but followed them anyway, because the actual Prescripts told them to. Then he discovers the true source of all the Prescripts: a machine that spits out seemingly random orders translated from scribbles made by seismic waves, described as the City's Tulpa. The only other human, Moirai, present in the room, is only there to oversee the whole process and to make sure the Prescripts get sent out accordingly. This realization, along with the other one he had learned about earlier, causes Yan to cross his Despair Event Horizon and just start chuckling as he laments how everything he had done had been All for Nothing, before distorting into the Prescript-parroting Mechanical Abomination 얀샋ㄷ요무, before being sent by a Prescript ordering him to go to the Library and sealing his fate in its hands. It really can leave a bitter taste in the player's mouth, seeing someone trying so hard to fight back against the Crapsack World of the City, only to fail and succumb to become a part of it once they realize just how corrupted everything and everyone is.
  • When 얀샋ㄷ요무 arrives at the Library, he only notes to Angela blankly how all things are tied to the Prescripts and how nothing can deviate from them. Come his Reception proper, and 얀샋ㄷ요무 will only repeat Prescripts throughout its entirety. It's just disheartening to see him fall so far and become nothing but a literal machine of the City.
  • His theme song, Children Of The City, recites Prescripts throughout, and mourns how the actions he thought were of his own free will to try and free the people were premeditated, and therefore meaningless, the whole time, and his subsequent despair in realizing that there was no way to break free from the shackles of the City's omnipotent will. What's probably the most devastating verse, however, is the song's final Prescript: Do not go home until you finish reading the value of “e”. That "e" is referring to the base of the Natural Logarithm, which is an Irrational number, meaning that it's endless. Yan is never going home.
  • Yan/얀샋ㄷ요무's page story only makes things worse, showing that, underneath his Distortion, he's ultimately completely resigned to his fate, saying he's simply not fit to break the cycle and that he ultimately would've accomplished more by simply killing himself instead of accepting the Prescript to become a messenger in the first place. The last paragraph is effectively him begging for someone else to succeed where he failed.
  "So I want someone to find an answer in my stead. And I hope they can tell me that. Tell me how I can enjoy this nightmare."
• Xiao's run in with the Library is one of the more tragic events of this game. She was a very professional woman who fell for her fellow Association lead, Lowell. She didn't want him to reciprocate her feelings in case they led to her acting irrationally and becoming weak, but the two of them did fall in love and married only a year before the events of the game. During the game, a distorted Phillip wrecks havoc against District 22, forcing her association into investigating the Library. The unbeatable abomination takes the life of her newlywed husband, and she was suddenly targeted by the force that engineers the Distortions, going completely Out of Character before the voice attempts to take over her. She is able to resist and successfully manifests an E.G.O. of her own. Despite this heroic twist that would render her victorious in many other settings, this is a Project Moon game. In the end, she gets booked alongside her husband and her Association team.
  • As mentioned in the Phillip case above, it's implied that the Library deliberately altered Phillip's escape route, broke him down and spared him for the sake of baiting out someone like Xiao and turning them into books, which would 1) Strengthen the Library for it's unknown goal, potentially on the will and orders of Carmen and 2) Make sure the Reverb Ensemble it is sponsoring goes unopposed.
  • This particular blow is softened by the Golden Ending: since Angela frees everybody who "died" in the Library and Xiao never Distorted, she comes back as a human and is able to reunite with her husband, Lowell.
• In the Black Silence reception, Roland reveals that his true reason for entering the Library and helping Angela gain her humanity was so that he could kill her himself. Despite her multitude of crimes, the sheer despair on Angela's face is still painful to see, compounded by just how cold and brutal Roland is when calling her out on her selfish and destructive actions and her own attempts at making excuses that slowly taper away as she seemingly realizes that Roland is right. It doesn't help that this is the most emotive we've seen Angela.
  • The entire Black Silence reception is a prolonged Heroic Blue Screen of Death for Roland that really communicates how angry and vengeful he feels, as well as conflicted about what he's doing. While the fight begins normally, Rolands second phase sees him Distort into a massive, mutated creature that looks like a combination between a crab, a horse, and seaweed made of human flesh. This entity is the "thing" that Roland saw at the heart of L-Corps nest that produced smoke as seen in the Binah Realization, and Roland taking on this form is symbolic for viewing himself as part of the social and institutional violences that push the City forward. His second phase sees him fight alongside a ghostly Angelica in a recreation of their fight against Elena, and when she's put down, Roland loses it and spends his final phase on the brink of mental collapse. His default pose goes from rigidly standing straight to hunched over with his hands in front of his face, so overcome with emotion that he spends most of this final phase in absolute hysterics.
    • The crowning part of all this? In his final phase, Roland gains a special mass-attack page called "Scream" that he will use to try and gain the advantage by heavily debuffing your librarians. The card art on this page depicts Roland stumbling across Angelica's body◊, which implies that the memory of seeing his wife's broken corpse is so awful for Roland to remember that the surge of emotion from thinking about it causes him to wail in agony so hard it hurts your librarians.
• Speaking of Roland, he might seem like a decent and easygoing guy at first...but as we delve deeper into the game's story...oh gosh. The entry above speaks matters, but there's how he ended up here. He was one of the most successful and prestiged Fixers in the City who married his ex-colleague Angelica, and were about to retire as a happy family. Unfortunately, after involving into a blackmail deal with a Fixer Office that inured the wrath of O Corp onto the Office's operator for the sake of getting a Nest permit, he was denied a Nest entry over a cheap excuse, and was stranded in the Backstreets...and then all hell breaks loose. His wife was then killed out of nowhere by the Pianist Distortion, and then when he came back after doing errands for Olivier, she was already dead. The City is already an unpredictable and scary place, but having an unprecedented incident spawning and killing your wife out of nowhere took the cake as one of the most traumatizing ways one can lose their loved ones. This escalated quick, as Roland then lost it and went onto an insane Roaring Rampage of Revenge cutting down basically anyone suspicious, including suspicious laboratories, whole chunks of Fingers or affiliated syndicates, and even fellow Fixers and innocents. Of course, he lost all of his standing afterwards and there's no choice for him but to go to the Library. Losing your loved one is one of the biggest reasons to lose it in this setting, but Roland's situation is almost as incredible as it is saddening.
  • Roland's rampage had also indirectly turned his former friends against him and created numerous enemies, most prominently the Reverberation Ensemble to form through making them cross the Despair Event Horizon and turning into a group of City-wrecking monstrosities that are almost unprecedented in terms of scope, especially he was assisting Angela in putting out those who could otherwise fend the City off from the Ensemble.
    • Argalia was also saddened and driven mad by Angelica's death, enough for him to turn against the city through manipulation and deceit and to view Roland as a sworn enemy for failing to protect his sister. He also began hearing the Distorting Voice and had basically lost it by the time of Star of the City.
    • While not directly involved in Roland's rampage, the aforementioned operator of the Fixer office who he blackmailed later became the Yesterday's Promise, one of the most destructive Distortions on record.
    • Special mentions to Jae-Heon. He was just minding his business trying to revive his son after he was ran over by a road roller, and was quite close to completing it (if his words were to be taken at face value). However, the angry black mask fixer suddenly rushed in and killed his son for no apparent reason, causing him to literally lose it and turn into the Puppeteer whose destructiveness and pervasiveness rivals those of Pluto. It's a nice reminder on how easy people do snap and turn into monstrosities upon the rise of the Distortion phenomenon.
    • Eileen's father was killed just because Roland likes it. He might had been an unrepentant and insane kidnapper, but his murder out of nowhere is still fairly tragic on Eileen's view.
  • Even worse? Angela might not even be wholly responsible for the Pianist — that was possibly a premeditated result of the Seed of Light. Losing the 4 days of light either meant that people will not manifest E.G.O. easily. He was obviously too insane to even care, not being different from most of the members of the Reverberation Ensemble who had crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
• Both of the Downer Endings succinctly demonstrate that if Roland and Angela got what they wanted instead of what they needed, they will merely submerge in depression and fade away, failing to ever break the City's cycle and themselves from it.
  • Angela's Downer Ending has her become a full human as she always wanted after booking Roland. However, to say that she ended up tragically is an understatement. After booking the traitor that she believed was her sole emotional support with tears on her eyes, she proceeds to kill all of the Sefirot, who were now human, defenseless and standing in her way. Unable to bear the guilt of sacrificing too much to obtain humanity and having been seen all the horrors in the City however, Angela never steps a foot into the outside world with her newfound human body, and the only thing she has achieved is to throw an aimless Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum against the City that the Head considered nothing more than a slight annoyance and the Library downgraded from Impurity to a mere Star of the City, which means it has been integrated into the City's cycle and no longer poses actual threat against it. Cue 13 years later, and she was so bored of the perpetual destruction that she just lets an unknown Bookhunter kill her, achieving nothing in return.
  • Roland in the other hand manages to be even more depressing than Angela's. Nothing flashy happens here — it is just emptiness in fine form. After Roland kills Angela and avenges his wife Angelica, the Library and all of its inhabitants within it vanish like a mirage and he returns to the City. Once he goes back, he fell into a deep depression not unlike Carmen a decade before. According to his former colleagues, he was overdosing on drugs and alchohol, doing shady businesses and is overall just "not worth meeting" as Olgier said. A while later, his corpse was drifting in a gutter silently being impaled with the weapons of his former friends and enemies, with only Astolfo being remotely sympathetic to his demise. This is effectively a legend of the City falling in the most depressingly cynical way possible, and it demonstrates the consequences of empty revenge for the sake of starkly.