Can someone please merge this? I am currently facing an issue that is being caused by this. It is a simple fix.

I can't confirm them.
Additionally, collation id is 1byte in wire protocol. So PyMySQL can't support collations over 256.

You should start utf8mb4 and use init_command="SET NAMES utf8mb4 COLLATE <collation you want to use> instead.

MySQL 5.7.18:

...
| 246 | utf8mb4            | utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci   |            |
| 247 | utf8mb4            | utf8mb4_vietnamese_ci    |            |
| 248 | gb18030            | gb18030_chinese_ci       | Yes        |
| 249 | gb18030            | gb18030_bin              |            |
| 250 | gb18030            | gb18030_unicode_520_ci   |            |
+-----+--------------------+--------------------------+------------+
222 rows in set (0.00 sec)

I don't know which version of MySQL (or MariaDB) do you use. But they are not portable.
Use portable collation at connection phase.

Going to close this, I pulled the wrong docker image version (8) when I was working with this

Even if MySQL 8 is released, PyMySQL can't use collations which id > 255.

Those were the character sets that I got by running the commands that were specified