Sync profiles to Joomla

I am using they Joomla Fields plugin with several mapped fields between moodle and joomla and when i try to do a sync it fails on a record throwing the error:

Incorrect string value: '\xFCder W...' for column `db`.`joom_fields_values`.`value` at row 1

i have narrowed it down that i don't believe it likes an umlaut character that exists in the moodle user profile when trying to add it to the joomla db. I can manually update the field in Joomla without an issue. looking for any recommendations as to why this occurring and what i can do to make it work?

yea its strange, i can manually use the characters in either platform, the characters work fine when i sync joomla->moodle with the fields plugin but when i try to reverse it and have the character in a moodle -> joomla sync its gets the dreaded 1366 db error. I've tried ruling out all the db encoding issues but making sure all databases/tables/columns are using the utf8mb4 charset. I'll keep digging, i may be missing something in the db configuration.