Thinking about Elidibus

[Anonymoose]

To what extent is balance between Light and Dark needed to trigger calamities?

Typically, just enough so that neither the Ascians nor Hydaelyn's chosen go overboard and tip the scales too much too fast. Igeyorhm went overboard on the Thirteenth, the Warriors of Light overthrowing Cylva's plan tipped the scales too much too fast on the First. If that happens, you get a Flood. Nobody wants a Flood.

You need Light and Darkness to be balanced enough so that you can set up the elemental conditions for a calamity and not have it break anything. That's part of what makes the 7th and 8th calamities more difficult to understand. You're exactly right: Light and Darkness aren't elements. You can't have a LIGHT calamity but you CAN use Light to imbalance all of the elements at once. This is so Square Enix can follow the pattern of calamities in the prophecy of Mezaya Thousand Eyes - one for each element, with one for each polarity at the end. (Though no one ever did find the Eighth Verse as far as we know. That a recent addition to your basement, Sharlayan? Does it suggest Black Rose still? Is that why you're all weird about this? Anyroad...)

The Source has wobbled back and forth a few times, and while we know for sure now the Source was leaning too much towards Darkness after the Seventh Umbral Era, we don't know if the Warrior of Light ever really pushed it too far too fast towards Light or if Elidibus just said that to make people doubt. But for the sake of a fun story sure let's go ahead and assume the WoL actually was rocking Elidibus's boat a little too much for his liking.

Also, if Elidibus was concerned with balance only to the extent necessary to accomplish the mission of the Ascians, that doesn't really make him any different to the other Ascians with regards to attitudes towards balance, right? So am I understanding you correctly in that his whole shtick of being the "balance guy" was just to con mortals into doing his (Zodiark's) bidding?

More or less. He wasn't lying. He did sometimes work against Darkness. He did sometimes work against his friends. That was his job even on the convocation, to find the best path forward for everyone even if it means having to arbitrate a dispute amongst your own. It's just that the "best path forward" (in his mind) was still Zodiark. (Probably because "tempered".)

What makes you think that the Ascians' plan was doomed from the start?

Aside from them finding different ways to suggest it in their deaths, I can't give a overly specific answer to this yet. There's a big detail we don't yet know. Venat's faction was adamant that Zodiark was a temporary solution, and the Convocation, for reasons unknown (probably because tempered) were stubbornly refusing to hear debate about why Zodiark wasn't going to fix ALL of this FOREVER. We don't know why that was. We don't know why Zodiark was a bandaid. There are a few reasons I can think of, but none of them would change the BASIC tenet that once the Convocation were tempered, it was very unlikely if not impossible that their true goals would ever be fully fulfilled, which is why Hydaelyn was created by their own countrymen, leading to the first ever Amaurotine civil war.

Using the Warriors of Darkness to continue the whole cycle of pressuring beast tribes into summoning ever stronger primals seems like it would not align the Source's aether with the First at all.

Elidibus has been running a series of course-corrections ever since we upset the first major plan in A REALM REBORN. During this particular phase, he was setting the Warriors of Darkness up to break the cycle of primal summoning themselves; the plan was to make them inspire versions of the primals so strong that defeating them would convince the beast tribes to abandon them once and for all and look towards... a new god... (dramatic noises). We never got to see what it was. Urianger threw that whole plan in the trash when he sent Minfilia to the First and they started working on the next idea.