Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
It's spoken of like Tempering,
Well, the fact that it's an Ishgardian speaking of it lends a certain bias. I always felt that statements like these were similar to how Christians blame Satan for "turning people evil" from time to time - the implication that normal, yet weak-willed people can be influenced by Satan to do evil acts. Even (maybe even especially) in the case of the old story of Thordan's expedition - we know his man betrayed him, but we only have the legend told by a group of dragon-haters that a dragon was responsible for the act. In reality, he could have had other reasons for doing so.

Given that this is a fantasy game, though, it's not impossible that the Dragons DO have some kind of literal mind-control powers. Are we to assume that all heretics are under this influence? Iceheart doesn't seem particularly weak-willed, for instance. Is she the sole execption, or are there others? Are brainwashed individuals a minority or the majority?

We just don't know enough about the heretics to say one way or another, and our primary source of intelligence on the heretics is the Ishgardians who hate them almost as much as they hate dragons.