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The tl;dr of Mandricardo is that he thinks he’s hot shit and he thinks he’s Roland’s fated rival. Roland killed his father! Roland holds Durandal, the one item missing from Mandricardo’s full Hektor equipment! Mandricardo is a strong fighter. Surely it was always meant to be like this. Surely Mandricardo and Roland are tied by a fate to kill each other.

Except that’s very much not the case. Mandricardo is the wrong genre savy. He’s a side character from a side story. He gets Durandal not in any heroic way, but by picking it up on the side of the road. He dies in a stupid, petty duel, against a guy he had never even heard of prior. The tragedy of Mandricardo is that he lived as a man convinced he was the center of the narrative, and yet died in the most meaningless way possible.

Fgo Mandricardo is Like That because he’s a guy who spend his whole life thinking he was the most important person in teh world, and now that he gets another shot after death he has no choice but to face the fact that everything he’s ever done came down to nothing. He’s no legendary warrior or even mighty foe. He’s a nobody. How can he face those heroes of the past when he’s barely a footnote in his original legend? How can he speak to the likes of Achilles or Paris as if he were an equal- when he’s even less than third-rate himself? Mandricardo is a man who has built his entire life on a belief that crumbled in his afterlife, and that left him with poor self esteem and even poorer social skills.