Solved: Vietnamese characters issue
 

I don't want to say how many ttf's I've tried and how many other pointless routes I went down as..the solution was readily available in App Manager...

My issue: I didn't get Vietnamese characters shown correctly in Vagalume (which was the only place I would ever even have those characters show).

Solution: Get Droid Fonts from App Manager. Reboot. Problem solved.

Additional: Even though this does take up 4MB+ it may well be worth looking into if you have ANY issues with special characters not displaying properly as the package mentions it covers west/east Europe, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean (and apparently Vietnamese), additional fonts, etc.