Alternatively, the Exalted Host and their divine masters allowed their baser natures to rule them once the war started turning in their favor, and so their rebellion devolved into a disgusting re-enactment of every hideous revenge fantasy they'd ever had about the former rulers of Creation. Adorjan was probably an honest mistake, but the slaughter of Ruvelia, the execution of the White Ram, the rejection of SWLIHN's offer of unquestioning servitude, the mutilation of Malfeas? It was all just a group of managerial AIs and sloppily-uplifted cavemen indulging their hateboner to the fullest possible extent, with no regard for consequence. They could have carefully pruned the Yozis' souls into something more-or-less benevolent, but they didn't want to, because the Exalted Host wanted to see the hate in their fallen foes' eyes while forcing them to take out their laundry.
Eh.
It's kind of weird to cast "an alpha strike on one of the scariest and most combat-capable of our enemies, taking it out of the war for the foreseeable future" as "an honest mistake". Yes, slaying Adrian's fetich drove her mad and created Adorjan. So fucking what? Adrian was a giant monster made out of fire and knives who rampaged at the edge of the world and moved
inwards whenever she got bored with killing faeries. Killing her fetich removed her from the board in a war that was pretty hard-fought even
without her.
Yes, the Exalted Host killed the White Ram – because, again, we're talking about the literal lynchpin of one of their enemies. You're casting the assassination of enemy general (one who, it should be noted, apparently gave the Primordials the ability to see anything they liked, anywhere) as an "execution" instead of an act of war. That this drove the All-Seeing Eye into a coma is, frankly, a bonus from a military perspective.
Ruvelia was a defeated enemy general. She was executed to ensure she couldn't act against the victors, and moreover to reshape Theion into a prison which could hold his siblings. The alternative would have been executing them all – which might well have been kinder, but they owed Gaia the favour. Note that "hold demons to servitude" wasn't even something the Exalted Host could
do, initially – it took Mara's offer of sorcery to give them that power.
And seriously, I can't parse rejecting She Who Lives in Her Name as anything but an act of pure "I don't want to be a robot" pragmatism, with a dash of "defectors gonna defect".
There's this trend in the fandom to cast the Primordial casualties of the war as perfect little snowflakes who were mutilated for
no raisin by the mean ol' Exalted Host, and while Malfeas' existence and subsequent exploitation was absolutely a warcrime by our standards, trying to turn the Primordial War into some kind of inverse black and white scenario whereby Cecelyne was
genuinely interested in fairness and the rule of law before the scheming Incarnae beat her up and stole her gavel is just... flat. I'm wondering where the idea that Ruvelia represented "all that was good in Malfeas" comes from, for example.
