Quote Originally Posted by Jandor View Post
I personally suspect the Loporrites were possibly underselling it a tad, maybe in order to not seem rude.

Not so much that Zodiark tempering isn't a big deal, more like 'the weak sauce primals you lot can muster aren't going to be a problem, but I don't really want to say that...'
The way I'd put the 'primals tempering was mostly an Ascian plot' thing would be: You know how engines in cars and motorcycles are sometimes designed to be louder, for no other reason than because their core market expects louder engines?

Zodiark was a big enough engine that he was always going to make noise, even if it's less noise than you might expect. Hydaelyn might be, too, except that she's an engine running so far away from anything with ears that nobody can hear it anyway. The primals made with Ascian instruction, though, were deliberately designed to have engines so loud that they rattle the windows they drive by.

...which, incidentally, might explain why one of the only primals outside of The Big Two that never tempered anyone, including its summoners, was Alexander. If Ascian-assisted primal summoning is a deliberately faulty and inefficient build, then it only makes sense that the guys that found and solved the engineering problem were the society of engineers.