Poor Decision making? (Spoilers)

[myahele]

I personally believe that the "experiments" that Lahabrea has done was all for this moment; especially since now we know they were allied with each other for years

1. Artificially (?) giving the echo to someone who never had it: Sahagin Priest
2. Using oneself as sacrifice for a stronger/ EX primal (this is kinda reaching out there)
3. Echo users becoming a vessel for a primal: Ysayle/Shiva

The Archbishop/ Heavensward seems to have been "farming" the populace for prayers: purposely letting in the heretics so they can cause havoc

[Anonymoose]

The Archbishop claims that the transformation was powered by a 1000 or so years of prayer and the power of the eye. Now unless I've missed a MAJOR detail, this is clearly not true. At no point has any characters mentioned Thordan with any benevolence, if anything he appears to be treated as a "cool" myth and people only talk about him when directly asked about it.

This isn't going to be a very critical analysis; I'm just kind of rambling off the top of my head. To outsiders, it seems a lot like what you're saying here, but things are different inside of religious communities. The longer that a scripture survives, the more versions of it are written, the more schisms create new denominations of it, the more and more elaborate some of the tales become (especially if this all started back when people generally knew less than they do later), and the more and more venerated they are.

There are apocryphic texts where Jesus tames dragons and make snakes explode and curses people blind. Saints of various religions are said to fly and walk through fires unburned and tear lions apart with their bare hands and become giants. That's the kind of stuff people are believing of King Thordan and the Knights Twelve - embellished, inflated stories backed by an extremely zealous central religion and the need for security after a millennium at war with dragons.

However, there IS a suitable "Person" who seemed to be ripe for the summoning. This person has and still is worshiped to this day by many Ishgardians. Characters also often pray to this person (off-handedly i'll admit) at multiple points during the MSQ. It just seems so obvious to me that Halone would be primal of choice for Ishgard.

Once you get that deep into your worship, a certain level of interaction with the godhead becomes so far over the line as to be considered blasphemous (though they clearly don't have a problem with idolatry or deity depiction given the art and statures, lol). I think the only person who'd dare do anything on Halone's behalf would be Thordan VII, and he wanted to become a god in and of himself using the inflated, mythical version of Thordan I.

Do you think we could have beaten Halone?

How many crystals did she eat?

Why Thordan over Halone?
Was the Archbishop uncomfortable in becoming a female primal?

Maybe, though he was clearly selfish in his desire. He wanted to be a God-King. I can't really tell where Halone would have fit into that. Does he do away with her and reign himself? Does he keep her above him as Her worldly representative and chosen ruler? I'll keep an eye out as I re-read things; I've only been over it the one time so far.

Where did the aether come from?

Now that I'm still fuzzy on. Crystals in their pocket, like Iceheart? lol