I'm sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit busy but I'm still trying to find a solution.
So I tried with fontconfig loaded and some tt fonts in ~/.fonts but it is still not working. Unfortunately I can't realy try booting with 'base' right now as I don't have access to a wired network but I will give it a try tommorow just to make sure nothing gets in the way.
Apart from fontconfig I only have wpa_supplicant, ntfs-3g and firmware-iwlwifi loaded on boot, and ofcourse all of their deps (expat2, openssl, wireless_tools, wireless). Other than that, my setup is a basic tc 3.4. Is there anything else that could be causing the issue? or anything more I could test?